The English Department's Blog

This week, we’ve been reviewing our schemes of assessment.  Now I know that sounds like the sort of activity usually reserved by Heads of Department as a particularly nasty punishment for their minions (some might even call it this), but two of us put a lot of hard work in last summer to draw up some new assessment objectives, which would, we hoped, be more useful to teachers and students alike. As with all such enterprises, some of what we did then worked, and some didn’t, so we sat down and tried to cut out some of the dead wood and make it all better for next year. It was interesting; it was challenging; at times, it was even fun, and it certainly made us reassess what we expect of our students.  At times I wanted to reduce the writing assessment objectives to something like this or this, but in the end we pulled together something that looked like it might be ok.

Having done that, we decided, following the principles of ‘pupil voice’ and all that, to find out if our efforts had not been entirely in vain, so we asked some boys in the Lower School what they thought.  We wanted to know if the new assessment grids were comprehensible, the sort of thing that they might consult before starting a piece of homework, and phrased in language they understood.  What impressed us was the quality of the feedback we received, especially from boys in Years 7 and 8, who were sharp and incisive in their comments, and always quick to identify jargon or unclear phrasing (if only they were so good when reading their own work!), and we came away with some really useful ideas.  Not all of them can be put into practice; some of them are irreconcilable; yet they will help transform documents designed by teachers into tools to be used by students.

I’ve been quick to praise Years 7 and 8, but what of Year 9?  I know for a fact that many hundreds of my students read the English Department blog, and I don’t want to belittle their efforts.  They were mature, thoughtful and about as good as one could hope for on a stuffy Wednesday afternoon in the dog days of June.  Yet their comments were far more mechanistic: tell us what do do, they said; tell us how to write so we can get an A*; don’t make us sit and read all this text, just tell us what to say and we’ll say it.

So it was with some happy interest that I read a post by the marvellous Texan photographer Kirk Tuck.  Entitled “What does it take to succeed in photography? I’d say discipline is near the top of the list” Tuck draws on his experience as a keen swimmer to set out the principle that the one, the only way to be successful as a photographer is to practice.  He writes of going on workshops and seeing photographers who are uncomfortable with their gear, or complain that manual focus is hard.  His response, practice.  Get to know your gear, practice with it, get out and try stuff so you know what works and what doesn’t.  As Tuck says, ‘if you do it over and over again you’ll find a side benefit.  Your own inimitable style will emerge.”  Perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves, and our students, that there is no easy way to become good, let alone great writers.  Technology may appear to offer quick fixes and instant engagement, and good assessment is a very useful tool, yet what matters is those hours putting the yards of ink in, keeping your eye glued to the viewfinder.

After a keenly felt period of absence, one of my favourite poetry websites is back up online.  The Wondering Minstrels presents a poem every day, along with a little comment and often some nicely illuminating discussion.  They have a great archive, going right back to 1999 (remember then? It could take a day to load a single sonnet), and I’m really looking forward to reading them every day.

At the moment, Year 9 are looking at spoken forms of English, studying how language is used in different places, contexts and forms.  It’s interesting stuff, and the interweb is full of all sorts of delights, such as Lauren’s outbursts against injustice; a wry report on the BBC about Doctors’ jargon, and the wonderful google ngram viewer.

We spent a lesson looking at slang terms, and used ngram as a means of exploring how usage has changed over time.  For example, “wicked” enjoyed a great flurry of usage in the seventeenth century (perhaps, one student suggested, because of that period’s fascination with witchcraft), but has declined fairly steadily since then. Looking, however, at the Twentieth Century’s use of the word, the picture changes.  Marked increases during the two World Wars, and then a slight increase – or at least a flattening out – from 1980 onwards.  Clearly, the new slang meaning of the work has had an impact on its popularity.  Will it ever reach the dizzying heights of the 1600′s, when it accounted for 2 out of every 10,000 words printed that year?

Ngram is a great tool.  The ability to compare word usages over time invites students to think critically about how and why language has changed over time.  Good fun.

Nottingham High School’s Bridge Cup competition has been running annually ever since 1947. It is such a long-running event and one that has become such a distinctive part of high school tradition, that it is sometimes easy to forget just how unusual it is.

It was the brainchild of Mr R.S. ‘Beaky’ Bridge, a former master and one of the school’s most memorable characters.  He was Senior History and Geography Master between 1920 and 1954, and he presented the Bridge Cup in memory of his father, who had been Principal of Trinity College of Music and Organist of Chester Cathedral.  It was to be awarded for an annual inter-House competition in Music and Elocution.

The verse reading sections of the competition seem to fly in the face of modern trends. It is no longer fashionable for people to learn poems off by heart. However, the first round of the individual verse section of the competition (held in November) requires participants to learn a poem of about 15 lines and to recite it to a judge. Each Year in the school is given a different test poem. For instance, in Year 10 it is Hardy’s poem “In the Time of the Breaking of Nations” and in Year 13 it is a Shakespeare sonnet. Each house enters a team of six boys in each year to recite this test poem and it is the job of the judges to award marks and to select the best performance in each House. The Finals are held in March and consist of the top boy in each House in each Year competing right to be the best in his Year. The seven winners (one boy from each House from each Year) are then invited to perform their poems again at the Bridge Cup Concert at the end of the spring term.

Every year nearly 200 boys altogether participate in the individual verse reading competition.

The competition’s most distinctive feature, however, is the event in which each of the four House verse choirs recites a poem chorally.  Much responsibility falls upon the shoulders of the senior boys who act as organisers and conductors, without any help from teachers.  Standards are generally extremely high, the most imaginative performances often exploiting the different pitches of the boys’ voices and the spatial possibilities of the school’s assembly hall.

This year’s Verse Choirs competition was distinguished by commitment and a seriousness of purpose. Each House was very well prepared and the judges understandably found it very difficult to come to their judgement. The criteria for success remain the same every year. It is very important that the audience can hear the words of the poems: not easy when such large forces are involved. Then the judges look for a performance that captures the spirit of the poem. And then there are considerations such as variety of pace and rhythm. Are the conductors taking advantage of the contrast between broken and unbroken voices – or between unison and solo contributions?

This year the four conductors each tackled the challenges offered by their chosen poems in imaginative ways, reaching very high standards. After considerable debate the judges decided on the following order:

1. Mellers’: The Five Students (Thomas Hardy)

2. Cooper’s:  Rhapsody on a Windy Night (T.S. Eliot)

3. Maples’:  The Listeners (Walter de la Mare)

4. White’s:  The Going of the Battery (Thomas Hardy)

Congratulations to all the conductors and their choirs – and especially to Mellers’.

(Postscript: Mrs Turner filmed the event with an iPhone. Apologies for the very poor video footage, we’ll film this event properly next year.)

Meller’s House

Cooper’s House

White’s House

Maple’s House

I wasn’t looking for this when I checked Longform.org this morning: I’d found this video of the Japanese tsunami, and hoped to find some writing about it that I could look at with Year 9, who are studying non-fiction at the moment.  As it turned out, there wasn’t yet, but there’s bound to be some there soon.

Nevertheless, A.A. Gill is always good value for money, and I found his dystopian description of Dubai fascinating.  I don’t know the place, and don’t pretend to judge the article’s truthfulness or accuracy, but as a piece of word-painting, it’s excellent.  I’ve clipped some good bits using Amplify, which I hope will encourage you to reflect on how Gill achieves such a distinctive prose style.

On Tuesday all of Year 10 trouped down en masse to Nottingham’s Royal Concert hall for the Poetry Live event. Over the course of a day, six different poets read and talked about their work, while an audience of two thousand teenagers roared wild applause and asked some searching questions.

Gillian Clarke talked movingly about how a poem that described a moment in her daughter’s life was transformed by imaginative readings by young people, and Carol Ann Duffy conjured many different voices, and Simon Armitage blended great poetry with the comic timing of a standup comedian.  We also listened to Tony Childs, the AQA Chief Examiner, speak on how to write well about poetry: the board clearly don’t want boys to regurgitate a list of facts, but to read sensitively and carefully.

The second half of the day cast our thoughts further abroad, yet also closer to home.  Imtiaz Dharker’s account of a burst main sending water flooding through a Mumbai transported the audience out of grey Nottingham, while Daljit Nagra’s Singh Song drew on the experiences of immigrants to Britain in a very funny and touching way.

The high point for many, though, was the conclusion to the afternoon, in the eccentric figure of John Agard, who sang, chanted, shouted and rapped his messages of tolerance, and challenged the old ‘eurocentric’ views that define how we see the world.

For all of us, this was an inspirational afternoon, and we’re looking forward to working on the poetry unit for the summer’s exam.