When I was an English teacher - and that was nearly all my working life - I was more creative than most. I sought to engage children in different ways, get them interested in our language and feel genuine accomplishment no matter what level their literacy had reached.
As years passed and the demands of formal examinations became more constraining, it became quite difficult to keep the candle of creativity burning, illuminating young minds. For instance, the so-called National Curriculum had us teaching proscribed Shakespeare texts to struggling youngsters so that they could have a stab at Key Stage Three exams that were essentially designed for middle class kids from leafy suburbs.
I could feel my least able pupils' pain and past experience had taught me that this was not the way to bolster standards of literacy. In fact, it was often the way to make less able children feel more useless than they already felt. Historical trust in classroom teachers to do what was best had been shredded in favour of centralised edicts and vague skeleton planning in glossy A4 folders that often left chalkface English teachers feeling lost, constantly wondering if they were doing what was expected of them or not.
But if I might return to the years of creativity... I used a variety of methods to get early secondary school children writing their own poems. I noticed that modern poetry anthologies frequently included accompanying pictures. Of course the editors of those collections picked the poems first and the visual images followed so I turned this process on its head and asked pupils to create poems inspired by pictures. Sometimes, with this end in mind, I even took them to local art galleries to make preparatory notes.
Having neglected to post one of my own poems on this blog for a good while now, I thought it would be an interesting exercise if I set myself the picture before the poem task.
This is the picture.
I took it in the Yorkshire town of Selby in the summer of 2020 during a lull in the COVID restrictions.
Created in half an hour this September night, three years after that far stranger one.
2020
That's quite good, professor!
ReplyDeleteDamned by faint praise.
DeleteI was not very successful in getting kids to write poetry. A kid turned in a nice poem one time. I read it a couple of times and it came to me that this poem was written by an older female. So I asked the kid who wrote the poem. He said his Mom wrote the poem.
ReplyDeleteAt least the child owned up. What was the mother thinking?
DeleteIf you published an anthology of your work I would buy it.
ReplyDeleteI plan to publish a collection with a very limited print run - self-funded because it's almost otherwise.
DeleteI am no judge of poetry (this suits me for today) but at some point references to that period of time in our lives will be important history, including artistic works and of course poetry is included in this.
ReplyDeleteYou are right. Like war poems. The great pandemic shutdown seems like yesterday but is already part of our shared history.
DeleteThe comparison with lepra or The Plague was frequently made at the time when Covid-related restrictions were at their strictest. In your poem, the line with ‘glancing furtively’ for me sums up the atmosphere I often felt when I was out and about. It was a strange time.
ReplyDeleteIt was as if you could not trust other humans. They might have killed us with their breath or their touch.
DeleteExcellent poem, I couldn't have thought of that. School teachers here, for all sunjects not just English are having to teach to a method that allows kids to pass a certain standard set by god-knows-who in government and the entire system is suffering. Much of the problem now is the huge amount of admin. paperwork that teachers also have to do leaving very little time for actual teaching. They are striking here, for better pay, (which they deserve) but I don't see how more money will create any more of the classroom time they and the children desperately need. Another problem is "inclusion" where children with special needs are included in regular classes and need so much extra attention that other students are left to themselves.
ReplyDeleteThe issues you raise sound very familiar but please do not remind me of that bloody paperwork. Mounds of it and so much energy wasted.
DeleteYou did well to write that in a half hour, it would take me an age.
ReplyDeleteI was a bright kid and went to a good school, I thought I was good at English until I wanted to do the "advanced" course in senior years and was knocked back on the basis that I was "better suited" to the "lower" course. I can't even remember what they called it now. I thought of that with your line about less able students feeling more useless
Education systems are constructed for success but if there is to be success there must be failure too. That second point is usually kept quiet.
DeleteI met some smart people from Selby
ReplyDeleteWhose ethos was what will be will be
Despite being asked
They never wore masks
They all have long covid in Selby
It would be easier to make up a COVID poem about Goole as it is a better name to rhyme with.... April fool, swimming pool, acting cool etc..
DeleteThere once was a young man of Goole, Who had a red ring wound his tool, ...
Delete.... The Doctor said, "Wuss, Don't make such a fuss, It's not Covid, it's lipstick, you fool".
DeleteI was in a packed 3 carriage train last Sunday and wondered if Covid was still around? How could the restrictions go over night? Good poem.
ReplyDeleteIt may come back to bite us this winter.
DeleteAn excellent poem capturing the ethos of the time. A time surely to go down in history, so luckily your poem is dated. There was such a lot of nonsense talked as governments came to terms with the disaster of a pandemic. We are not exactly on the other side of the pandemic either for it is still swirling around in the ether transmuting as it goes.
ReplyDeleteIt's like a ghost that haunts us and will surely return as most ghosts do.
DeleteSocial DIstance
ReplyDeleteSocial Distance
A strange way of keeping distance
There was nothing social about
Keeping everyone two meters apart
The face coverings covered out coughs
And our fears
But didn’t hide our blues
As we searched for clues
Hoping we would survive
Wondering when we would thrive
Returning to a social norm,
Not a distant norm
Applause from the north of England. Well done Mr Penguin.
DeleteI like the poem; it sums up those days.
ReplyDeleteIt was all so eerie - especially at night.
DeleteYou've captured that feeling of fear and mistrust.
ReplyDeleteAnd we had no idea when or how it might end.
DeleteIt all seems so surreal now, even expressed in poetry! I think teachers universally chafe against edicts and requirements imposed from above.
ReplyDeleteAt the start of my "career" I had seventeen years of feeling quite trusted and quite free to deliver English as I saw fit. In 1995 it all changed with the advent of the boogie man... I mean The National Curriculum.
DeleteYou captured the feeling of that time very well, Neil.
ReplyDelete'Twas a weird time. Why are the boffins shaking hands?
ReplyDelete