I was at one of Michael O'Leary's excellent storytelling sessions and typically, having talked too much and listened to little, did not have the complete picture to share someone else's contribution. I therefore declared my intention to confabulate.
Surprisingly, I thought, confabulate was a word unfamiliar to the audience and I had to explain that it is the kind of gap filling that people with mental health or memory problems do to complete an account when they lack all the information.
Reflecting of this a bit more, it occurs to me that confabulation is probably part of the process that helps build urban myths and legends and may help to feed prejudices.
We stayed at a B&B and in the morning the owner, who did everything to make us comfortable and served a decent breakfast, felt the need to regale us with his attitudes on the ban on Baa, Baa Blacksheep and the Three Little Pigs story to appease "the blacks and the asians." He was pleased to inform us that he was serving sausages despite the "Common Market's attempt to ban them, on the "asians" being given taxis who then put the native taxi drivers out of business, and carried on with lots of other similar tales and opinions.
It would be easy to do a Gordon Brown and put this down to simple bigotry. What is more likely is that unfounded opinions are a kind of confabulation.
The sausage story can be traced back to an episode of Yes Minister, but the others have just grown and been circulated in the way that most urban legends grow, by word of mouth. I've heard it told that if you were to tell a newspaper, quite falsely, that you had seen a UFO and they then reported the story, a number of other people would then call to confirm the sighting with apparent sincerity.
Schools don't really teach about evidence, so if we are careless we believe what we hear unless we happen to know better. Snake Oil salesmen grow rich because most of us never ask for the evidence that their product works. Why blame people for similarly accepting explanations for things they know nothing about. They simply confabulate to fill the gaps.
Storytellers can be held to account. Who doesn't know the story of the Marie Celeste? The unfinished meals and half empty teacups - you've heard Arthur Conan Doyle's account. She was the Mary Celeste and the real story is equally fascinating. We confabulate on the one that's familiar.
Wednesday 25 July 2012
Thursday 17 May 2012
“She Could Have Been Raped Because of You!”
You walk into some classrooms as a supply
teacher and every mobile 'phone comes out. You can spot the fact that
little fingers are busy under the desk texting frantically. I've been
in one school which allows students to use their 'phones, but the
usually policy is to have them switched off during lessons.
There are some routine excuses.
“My
Mum's in hospital,” is so common as to suggest the existence of a
plague which targets the mums of teenagers.
“I
was using the calculator,” occurs in classes where there are class
sets of calculators and in classes where a calculator isn't needed.
“Miss
let's us listen to music,” suggests that “Miss” doesn't
understand that music in the wrong circumstances in just as
distracting as any other noise. It's never true.
“I
just got a message so I need to reply,” means the 'phone was
switched on and the message probably came from someone the other side
of the room.
Mobile 'phones also have cameras and an ever
increasing number of teachers find themselves starring on YouTube. It
is difficult to have them removed once they are on.
On the day in question there was lots of
texting going on so I said, “hands and 'phones on desks.” There
was some attempt to hide them and a few probably succeeded, but with
the assistance of the TA, fifteen mobiles phones were collected,
labelled with post-it notes and placed in my bag for safe keeping.
You have to be careful about collecting 'phones
in some schools. You might get thumped.
At the end of the lesson the students lined up
for their 'phones. Unfortunately, one student, Joanne, forgot and
without checking I went home with her 'phone still in my bag.
At
about six-thirty I got an urgent call from my agency.
“Could
you please drive to the school now and take the girl's phone back?”
my consultant requested.
“No,”
I replied, “I'm having dinner and I don't want a thirty mile round
trip.”
Ten minutes later the Headteacher was on the
'phone. “You do realise that what you did is theft, don't you?”
he informed me.
I told him that I would return the 'phone after
school the following day. After a lot of arguing he finally accepted
that I had to work in another school and that it was just not
possible to sort it out before.
When I get to the school at about four-thirty I
was met by a deputation of the Headteacher, Joanne's tutor, Joanne,
Joanne's parents, her brother and several of her friends. I was given
several lectures about my carelessness and about how distressed
Joanne had been, being unable to talk to her friends. I apologised,
pointing out that it was quite an easy mistake to make and it had
happened because Joanne had been breaking school rules. I discovered
that was irrelevant.
The parting remark from from Joanne's father
summed up how out of proportion things can get and what stupid
attributes are attached to mobile 'phones. Pointing to Joanne, he
said, “she could have been raped because of you.”
Is there an answer to that? I can't think of
one a teacher could use.
Saturday 21 April 2012
The Dead End of Spelling Reform
Having just seen English, the language that I know and love, described as "putrid", I have decided to reinstate this article and damn the consequences.
Sometimes an idea pops up which appears to have potential but which, after further consideration, you realise is not only impractical but also potentially damaging.
There is a campaigner for spelling reform who infects Internet forums like a virus. She has a bee in her bonnet that changing English spelling will improve education, reduce crime, reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancy and mitigate any number of social ills.
Her justification for these claims is her “research”. This “research” involves no peer reviewed studies of teaching and learning, no statistical analyses of the “problem”; no longitudinal studies, in fact, nothing that one normally associates with the term research. Her “research” consists almost entirely of copying from the dictionary and counting, words which have irregular spellings, are homonyms or retain their foreign roots, assembling them together and saying, “look, these words sound the same but are spelt differently. It's obvious that they are the cause of many educational and social problems. It's common sense.”
As the eminent scientist Lewis Wolpert has pointed out,(1) common sense is an unreliable guide and provides the wrong answer more often than not. It is why research is not about trying to prove what you believe to be true. It is not about selling a theory or a book. It is about testing it.
Our spelling heroine does not like the idea of testing her theory. She is also incredibly hostile to discussing it. She spams links to her books and blogs. She posts interminable lists of words, claiming that “you only have to look at them to see that it is obvious there's a problem.” Obviously, everyone who looks at her lists can't see a problem. After all, they can read and there is not a single word on any of her lists that an average reader doesn't know the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of. Her defence of wanting to change the language is that it would benefit those who can't read. There is, again, no justification of this claim other than, “it's obvious.” Criticising this particular doctrine is risky. There have been suggestions of legal action to defend it.
Our heroine has been compared to a Jehovah's Witness in the way she promotes her doctrine. This is not an unfair comparison. The Evangelists have a message and an assumed duty to convey that message to as many people as possible. The Book, in their case the Bible, contains all the evidence that the end of the world is nigh and that they have a duty to save all those who accept their message. Anyone who has met one of these evangelists will have noticed that they may be nice people, but they are unable and unwilling to take on board counter arguments and evidence. Anything not in the book must be wrong.
Our Language Maven(2) is no different. She has the fall back position of her lists of words. These are all the evidence she needs. Counter argument and evidence are rejected as being unhelpful and rude, or as she says, “rood”. More on the New English later.
Part of the unwillingness to discuss spelling reform comes from the belief that being an English speaker is proof that you lack the intelligence to understand the problem. People with a different perspective are stupid.
English is, apparently, a trivial and inconsequential language. It is argued that:
"It is because English dictionaries include so many words which are not really English that has created the myth that English has far more words than other languages."
Remember that this observation comes from "the world's leading language expert." What it demonstrates is a woeful lack of understanding of how language develops. A more rounded and insightful observation on how English has developed can be found in the work of lesser experts. I recommend John McWhorter's(3) entertaining account of how English developed from the early Celts to absorb words from various invaders and from the study of religious and philosophical texts. English has grown as Britain became a World power. I can't help wondering if our status in the world would be enhanced by our being called Grayt Britten.
Many Countries have institutions devoted to preserving the integrity of the language. The Academie Francaise has the responsibility of maintaining the French dictionary and protecting the French language from loanwords. This has had varying degrees of success because language is dynamic and responds to the needs of the people who speak it rather than to the dictates of people in ivory towers. These institutions have proved remarkably ineffective in keeping English words out of their language.
Britain does not have such an Academy nor does it need one. The Oxford English Dictionary is maintained and updated on the basis of usage. If a word becomes current and is persistent then it finds its way into the dictionary. The latest edition, just published, contains some two thousand new words.
Samuel Johnson was well aware that trying to maintain an established orthography was pointless. He observed:
"With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength."
If all the English speaking countries were ever to agree on spelling reform, they would be agreeing to an endless process of argument and revision because the language would simply refuse to stand still long enough for them the establish any meaningful rules.
The claim that most English words are foreign is disingenuous. English has the remarkable ability to take on board any new concept wherever it comes from. Meeting with coastal glacial valleys in Norway, the word fjord served the descriptive purpose admirably and became an English word. Scientists looking for a word for special kinds of tidal waves could do no better than tsunami. Quisling proved an ideal word for a collaborator , being the name of one such person. There are no hangups. Words are for communication. The three examples are now English words but recorded alongside their origins in dictionaries. We borrow, but we also give credit.
The history and origins of the English language as explained by our heroine reveal some remarkable insights. It is summed up thus:
"U need to understand that English spelling did not ‘evolve’ like the language. It was fixed by a few printers and, above all, by Samuel Johnson 253 years ago, a man with an amazingly good memory, but not fond of children and weird in many ways."
So that's Samuel Johnson out of the way. The fact that he was a great poet, writer, biographer and essayist is of no consequence. He was "weird." This means that his dictionary is not to be trusted. He obviously made it the way it is because "he was not fond of children." All the more reason to scrap it and start again.
Johnson's dictionary was a supreme piece of scholarship, not at all weird and bearing no grudge against children. He certainly didn't underestimate the task:
"When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression, to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority."(4)
He had to make choices, to make compromises, to choose one spelling over another and he explains these choices in the preface to his dictionary. To understand the scholarship of this work you need to read it. There are choices that you may not agree with, but to write the man's work off in a sentence is criminal.
What Johnson clearly understood was that a dictionary is of use if people can use it to look up word they find in their reading. It was for that reason he established the methodology, still in use to day, of polling usage. It was too big a task for one man even then, but his achievement cannot be underestimated. Modern dictionaries poll millions of books and documents to track new words, changes of meaning and changes of use. Etymology is also important. Johnson understood that and it remains a vital part of maintaining a dictionary.
The OED is quite different from institutions like the Academie Francaise. It is not about managing and controlling English, but about maintaining an accurate and up to date record of it.
Having written off English as an inconsequential language made up of borrowed words, our researcher goes on to tell us yet more of the consequences of English spelling. Not only does it account for the entire range of socioeconomic problems in English speaking countries, it is also the reason that Britain has never achieved anything of note in the fields of literature, science, engineering, art, philosophy or much else. We are, it seems, a nation of non achievers and all because our spelling is not as transparent as high achieving countries like Finland, Greece and Lithuania.
Make no mistake, we can learn a lot from the education of Finland. True, they have a more transparent system of spelling, but other features of the language make it rather more difficult to learn than English. What the Finns also do is start formal education several years later than in the UK. They prioritise reading in a way that hasn't been the case in the UK and they rapidly intervene when faced with children who are struggling. To isolate spelling as the key variable is at best sloppy and at worst dishonest. You really have to look at the whole picture.
I've just watched a Discover Ireland advert on the TV. It's message is that everyone discovers Ireland, or some aspect of it, for themselves. It appears that our language expert has had a similar experience in discovering English. In the same way that you have the irritating person who returns from holiday somewhere and talks about it as nobody else has ever been there before, out expert does the same with English. She assumes that nobody else has ever noticed that, for example, weird does not seem to obey the rules and feels the need to tell everyone again and again and again. The difference, I think, is that most of us discovered English as our first language whereas she discovered it as a second language. What we take for granted, she needs to feel concern about.
Or expert doesn't believe in accents. She describes some British accents as "horrendous," mine included. The spelling of everything written has to reflect RP. That is something it certainly doesn't do right now. There have been endless discussions about accents and how they might be handled and all objections have been dismissed out of hand. A recent BBC programme about language observed that RP is spoken by about 3% of the population of England and by a tiny fraction of the World's English speakers. Just who is this proposal serving? Rather than raking over old ground, I'll just look at the 'garage' problem.
One of the funniest, (based on audience response), one liners comes from Hancock's Half Hour Radio show. Hancock has a car parked in the road, where it is causing an obstruction. A council official addresses the problem:
"It's got to be moved!"
"It cannot be moved I have got nowhere to put it"
"Put it in a garage!"
"I have not got a garage"
As it stands you might wonder where the joke is, but it stems from the pronunciation ofgarage. The script says "garage," but the actors know what they should say. "Put it in a garridge," says the official. "I have not got a garahj," Hancock replies, separating the snob from the common man. Since out expert neither understands the joke nor finds it funny, it is no wonder she dismisses the problem.
We all read the word garage and pronounce it as out accent or attitude dictates. I say something like "garrudge". So how should it be spelt? At present it's neutral. If it's changed, will it be common man or snob? The same question must be asked of every word we all can read but say differently.
There are plenty of proposals. "Let's change all the words that sound as if they end with an -er sound to -er." So we would have dokter, akter, awfer, armer, center, injer, vender, doler, sofer, quoter and the cuddly black and white bear, pander. On what basis are these changes proposed? A survey of English speakers, perhaps? A detailed analysis of recordings of different people speaking? No! We are told, "That's how I have always heard them and always pronounce them myself."
So English spelling should be changed to suit how a Lithuanian with English as a second language speaks and hears.
We routinely use the term spelling mistake, when we more correctly should refer to a writing error or an inaccuracy in rendering a word.
Not all spelling errors are the same and many of the errors that occur in English are equally common in other languages. Transcription and transposition errors are common, s for z and vice versa and the use of the wrong vowel. Low use words might be guessed as may guessing from unknown etymology. Writing (and typing) quickly can also result in omission errors.
One possible reason for a decline in reading standards in a decline in early vocabulary. We learn to speak by hearing and repeating words, phases and sentences. If parents do not talk to their children their vocabulary doesn't develop. Teaching reading, by whatever system, is necessarily based around a child's vocabulary and if that is significantly less than what might be expected, reading is likely to suffer. The view that children are not spoken or read to and are simply stuck in front of the TV or farmed out may be part of the reason. This is certainly the view of the charity I-CAN.(5)
Spelling is an unwritten and unspoken agreement between people who share a language that it will be written according to a particular set of rules. While these rules vary slightly between countries, there is a great deal of consistency. The important thing is that a person reading a piece of writing can understand it.
Spelling is not something that can be changed easily. A change in spelling represents an enormous change in a language. Spelling is something which maintains the unity of a language for people all over the world. It is the glue that hold it together. If you change spelling unilaterally in one country then it effectively becomes a foreign language for everyone else. Worse than that, it becomes a foreign language for all the people within the country who have internalised their spelling and sight read efficiently. They would be forced back to reading by decoding.
It is not entirely clear, but it would appear that our expert has assumed that all people always read by decoding individual words. While you might have to for Icelandic football teams like Hafnarfjordur, most words will be familiar. If they cease to be because someone has changed them, then most people will be worse off.
What might be lost if we were to change the language? According to our expert, not a lot, given that the language is of no consequence. A few examples might amuse people with a love of English, although our expert does not find them worthy. Let's take Flanders and Swann's "Gnu Song". Does it work with a revised version of English?
'I'm a G-nu, I'm a G-nu The g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo
I'm a G-nu, How do you do. You really ought to k-now w-ho's w-ho
I'm a G-nu, Spelt G-N-U. I'm g-not a Camel or a Kangaroo
So let me introduce, I'm g-neither man nor moose
Oh g-no g-no g-no I'm a G-nu
or
I am a noo, I am a noo, duh nysest work of naytur in duh zoo
I am a noo, How do U do. U reelee awt to no hoos hoo
I am a noo, spelt N-O-O, I am not a camel or a kanguhroo (probably bufalow)
So let me introjews, I am nyver man nor moos,
O no, no, no, I am a noo.
The first version always earned long applause when Flanders and Swann sang it. I can't imagine anyone seeing the point of the second. How many of us, I wonder, having heard Flanders and Swann, always refer to the eponymous animal as a g-nu?
What we learn from this song was that Flanders was very much in tune with his audience. He had a masterly grasp of English but he knew that the audience would understand. Unlike out heroine, he treated them as intelligent people who would understand his creative use of the language. Flanders songs are examples of the creativity that English, with all its idiosyncracies, allows.
One of the frightening things about spelling reformers and the current crop of phonics ideologues is just how arrogant, authoritarian and illiberal they are. They need to be in control of the spelling and of the learning. What they say goes. Phonics is already well on the way to crippling a generation of readers and how long will it be before they decide that the way forward is for them to take control of the language ad strip it of any semblance of originality, sacrificed on an altar of claimed common sense.
On a more optimistic note, English is littered with names who claimed to know better then anyone else. I wish the current crop would just leave it alone to evolve as it will.
Sometimes an idea pops up which appears to have potential but which, after further consideration, you realise is not only impractical but also potentially damaging.
There is a campaigner for spelling reform who infects Internet forums like a virus. She has a bee in her bonnet that changing English spelling will improve education, reduce crime, reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancy and mitigate any number of social ills.
Her justification for these claims is her “research”. This “research” involves no peer reviewed studies of teaching and learning, no statistical analyses of the “problem”; no longitudinal studies, in fact, nothing that one normally associates with the term research. Her “research” consists almost entirely of copying from the dictionary and counting, words which have irregular spellings, are homonyms or retain their foreign roots, assembling them together and saying, “look, these words sound the same but are spelt differently. It's obvious that they are the cause of many educational and social problems. It's common sense.”
As the eminent scientist Lewis Wolpert has pointed out,(1) common sense is an unreliable guide and provides the wrong answer more often than not. It is why research is not about trying to prove what you believe to be true. It is not about selling a theory or a book. It is about testing it.
Our spelling heroine does not like the idea of testing her theory. She is also incredibly hostile to discussing it. She spams links to her books and blogs. She posts interminable lists of words, claiming that “you only have to look at them to see that it is obvious there's a problem.” Obviously, everyone who looks at her lists can't see a problem. After all, they can read and there is not a single word on any of her lists that an average reader doesn't know the pronunciation, spelling and meaning of. Her defence of wanting to change the language is that it would benefit those who can't read. There is, again, no justification of this claim other than, “it's obvious.” Criticising this particular doctrine is risky. There have been suggestions of legal action to defend it.
Our heroine has been compared to a Jehovah's Witness in the way she promotes her doctrine. This is not an unfair comparison. The Evangelists have a message and an assumed duty to convey that message to as many people as possible. The Book, in their case the Bible, contains all the evidence that the end of the world is nigh and that they have a duty to save all those who accept their message. Anyone who has met one of these evangelists will have noticed that they may be nice people, but they are unable and unwilling to take on board counter arguments and evidence. Anything not in the book must be wrong.
Our Language Maven(2) is no different. She has the fall back position of her lists of words. These are all the evidence she needs. Counter argument and evidence are rejected as being unhelpful and rude, or as she says, “rood”. More on the New English later.
Part of the unwillingness to discuss spelling reform comes from the belief that being an English speaker is proof that you lack the intelligence to understand the problem. People with a different perspective are stupid.
English is, apparently, a trivial and inconsequential language. It is argued that:
"It is because English dictionaries include so many words which are not really English that has created the myth that English has far more words than other languages."
Remember that this observation comes from "the world's leading language expert." What it demonstrates is a woeful lack of understanding of how language develops. A more rounded and insightful observation on how English has developed can be found in the work of lesser experts. I recommend John McWhorter's(3) entertaining account of how English developed from the early Celts to absorb words from various invaders and from the study of religious and philosophical texts. English has grown as Britain became a World power. I can't help wondering if our status in the world would be enhanced by our being called Grayt Britten.
Many Countries have institutions devoted to preserving the integrity of the language. The Academie Francaise has the responsibility of maintaining the French dictionary and protecting the French language from loanwords. This has had varying degrees of success because language is dynamic and responds to the needs of the people who speak it rather than to the dictates of people in ivory towers. These institutions have proved remarkably ineffective in keeping English words out of their language.
Britain does not have such an Academy nor does it need one. The Oxford English Dictionary is maintained and updated on the basis of usage. If a word becomes current and is persistent then it finds its way into the dictionary. The latest edition, just published, contains some two thousand new words.
Samuel Johnson was well aware that trying to maintain an established orthography was pointless. He observed:
"With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength."
If all the English speaking countries were ever to agree on spelling reform, they would be agreeing to an endless process of argument and revision because the language would simply refuse to stand still long enough for them the establish any meaningful rules.
The claim that most English words are foreign is disingenuous. English has the remarkable ability to take on board any new concept wherever it comes from. Meeting with coastal glacial valleys in Norway, the word fjord served the descriptive purpose admirably and became an English word. Scientists looking for a word for special kinds of tidal waves could do no better than tsunami. Quisling proved an ideal word for a collaborator , being the name of one such person. There are no hangups. Words are for communication. The three examples are now English words but recorded alongside their origins in dictionaries. We borrow, but we also give credit.
The history and origins of the English language as explained by our heroine reveal some remarkable insights. It is summed up thus:
"U need to understand that English spelling did not ‘evolve’ like the language. It was fixed by a few printers and, above all, by Samuel Johnson 253 years ago, a man with an amazingly good memory, but not fond of children and weird in many ways."
So that's Samuel Johnson out of the way. The fact that he was a great poet, writer, biographer and essayist is of no consequence. He was "weird." This means that his dictionary is not to be trusted. He obviously made it the way it is because "he was not fond of children." All the more reason to scrap it and start again.
Johnson's dictionary was a supreme piece of scholarship, not at all weird and bearing no grudge against children. He certainly didn't underestimate the task:
"When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression, to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority."(4)
He had to make choices, to make compromises, to choose one spelling over another and he explains these choices in the preface to his dictionary. To understand the scholarship of this work you need to read it. There are choices that you may not agree with, but to write the man's work off in a sentence is criminal.
What Johnson clearly understood was that a dictionary is of use if people can use it to look up word they find in their reading. It was for that reason he established the methodology, still in use to day, of polling usage. It was too big a task for one man even then, but his achievement cannot be underestimated. Modern dictionaries poll millions of books and documents to track new words, changes of meaning and changes of use. Etymology is also important. Johnson understood that and it remains a vital part of maintaining a dictionary.
The OED is quite different from institutions like the Academie Francaise. It is not about managing and controlling English, but about maintaining an accurate and up to date record of it.
Having written off English as an inconsequential language made up of borrowed words, our researcher goes on to tell us yet more of the consequences of English spelling. Not only does it account for the entire range of socioeconomic problems in English speaking countries, it is also the reason that Britain has never achieved anything of note in the fields of literature, science, engineering, art, philosophy or much else. We are, it seems, a nation of non achievers and all because our spelling is not as transparent as high achieving countries like Finland, Greece and Lithuania.
Make no mistake, we can learn a lot from the education of Finland. True, they have a more transparent system of spelling, but other features of the language make it rather more difficult to learn than English. What the Finns also do is start formal education several years later than in the UK. They prioritise reading in a way that hasn't been the case in the UK and they rapidly intervene when faced with children who are struggling. To isolate spelling as the key variable is at best sloppy and at worst dishonest. You really have to look at the whole picture.
I've just watched a Discover Ireland advert on the TV. It's message is that everyone discovers Ireland, or some aspect of it, for themselves. It appears that our language expert has had a similar experience in discovering English. In the same way that you have the irritating person who returns from holiday somewhere and talks about it as nobody else has ever been there before, out expert does the same with English. She assumes that nobody else has ever noticed that, for example, weird does not seem to obey the rules and feels the need to tell everyone again and again and again. The difference, I think, is that most of us discovered English as our first language whereas she discovered it as a second language. What we take for granted, she needs to feel concern about.
Or expert doesn't believe in accents. She describes some British accents as "horrendous," mine included. The spelling of everything written has to reflect RP. That is something it certainly doesn't do right now. There have been endless discussions about accents and how they might be handled and all objections have been dismissed out of hand. A recent BBC programme about language observed that RP is spoken by about 3% of the population of England and by a tiny fraction of the World's English speakers. Just who is this proposal serving? Rather than raking over old ground, I'll just look at the 'garage' problem.
One of the funniest, (based on audience response), one liners comes from Hancock's Half Hour Radio show. Hancock has a car parked in the road, where it is causing an obstruction. A council official addresses the problem:
"It's got to be moved!"
"It cannot be moved I have got nowhere to put it"
"Put it in a garage!"
"I have not got a garage"
As it stands you might wonder where the joke is, but it stems from the pronunciation ofgarage. The script says "garage," but the actors know what they should say. "Put it in a garridge," says the official. "I have not got a garahj," Hancock replies, separating the snob from the common man. Since out expert neither understands the joke nor finds it funny, it is no wonder she dismisses the problem.
We all read the word garage and pronounce it as out accent or attitude dictates. I say something like "garrudge". So how should it be spelt? At present it's neutral. If it's changed, will it be common man or snob? The same question must be asked of every word we all can read but say differently.
There are plenty of proposals. "Let's change all the words that sound as if they end with an -er sound to -er." So we would have dokter, akter, awfer, armer, center, injer, vender, doler, sofer, quoter and the cuddly black and white bear, pander. On what basis are these changes proposed? A survey of English speakers, perhaps? A detailed analysis of recordings of different people speaking? No! We are told, "That's how I have always heard them and always pronounce them myself."
So English spelling should be changed to suit how a Lithuanian with English as a second language speaks and hears.
We routinely use the term spelling mistake, when we more correctly should refer to a writing error or an inaccuracy in rendering a word.
Not all spelling errors are the same and many of the errors that occur in English are equally common in other languages. Transcription and transposition errors are common, s for z and vice versa and the use of the wrong vowel. Low use words might be guessed as may guessing from unknown etymology. Writing (and typing) quickly can also result in omission errors.
One possible reason for a decline in reading standards in a decline in early vocabulary. We learn to speak by hearing and repeating words, phases and sentences. If parents do not talk to their children their vocabulary doesn't develop. Teaching reading, by whatever system, is necessarily based around a child's vocabulary and if that is significantly less than what might be expected, reading is likely to suffer. The view that children are not spoken or read to and are simply stuck in front of the TV or farmed out may be part of the reason. This is certainly the view of the charity I-CAN.(5)
Spelling is an unwritten and unspoken agreement between people who share a language that it will be written according to a particular set of rules. While these rules vary slightly between countries, there is a great deal of consistency. The important thing is that a person reading a piece of writing can understand it.
Spelling is not something that can be changed easily. A change in spelling represents an enormous change in a language. Spelling is something which maintains the unity of a language for people all over the world. It is the glue that hold it together. If you change spelling unilaterally in one country then it effectively becomes a foreign language for everyone else. Worse than that, it becomes a foreign language for all the people within the country who have internalised their spelling and sight read efficiently. They would be forced back to reading by decoding.
It is not entirely clear, but it would appear that our expert has assumed that all people always read by decoding individual words. While you might have to for Icelandic football teams like Hafnarfjordur, most words will be familiar. If they cease to be because someone has changed them, then most people will be worse off.
What might be lost if we were to change the language? According to our expert, not a lot, given that the language is of no consequence. A few examples might amuse people with a love of English, although our expert does not find them worthy. Let's take Flanders and Swann's "Gnu Song". Does it work with a revised version of English?
'I'm a G-nu, I'm a G-nu The g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo
I'm a G-nu, How do you do. You really ought to k-now w-ho's w-ho
I'm a G-nu, Spelt G-N-U. I'm g-not a Camel or a Kangaroo
So let me introduce, I'm g-neither man nor moose
Oh g-no g-no g-no I'm a G-nu
or
I am a noo, I am a noo, duh nysest work of naytur in duh zoo
I am a noo, How do U do. U reelee awt to no hoos hoo
I am a noo, spelt N-O-O, I am not a camel or a kanguhroo (probably bufalow)
So let me introjews, I am nyver man nor moos,
O no, no, no, I am a noo.
The first version always earned long applause when Flanders and Swann sang it. I can't imagine anyone seeing the point of the second. How many of us, I wonder, having heard Flanders and Swann, always refer to the eponymous animal as a g-nu?
What we learn from this song was that Flanders was very much in tune with his audience. He had a masterly grasp of English but he knew that the audience would understand. Unlike out heroine, he treated them as intelligent people who would understand his creative use of the language. Flanders songs are examples of the creativity that English, with all its idiosyncracies, allows.
One of the frightening things about spelling reformers and the current crop of phonics ideologues is just how arrogant, authoritarian and illiberal they are. They need to be in control of the spelling and of the learning. What they say goes. Phonics is already well on the way to crippling a generation of readers and how long will it be before they decide that the way forward is for them to take control of the language ad strip it of any semblance of originality, sacrificed on an altar of claimed common sense.
On a more optimistic note, English is littered with names who claimed to know better then anyone else. I wish the current crop would just leave it alone to evolve as it will.
Thursday 19 April 2012
What Really Matters is Breeding
Am I White Yet?
Dad is black and Mum is black.
I'm not white yet.
Dad is black and Mum is white.
Am I white yet?
Dad is white and mum is black.
Am I white yet?
Granddad's black and Grandma's white.
Dad is white and Mum's not white yet.
Am I white yet?
Great Granddad's black and Great Grandma's white.
Granddad's white and Grandma's not white yet.
Dad's white and Mum's not quite white yet.
Am I white yet?
I go back through generations.
My kin come from many nations.
But t'will only take one black kin.
To prevent me having white skin.
So I'm not white yet.
I was doing some work at a minor stately home and, chatting with the very pleasant owner, somehow got on to the subject of class. He suggested that, "You can become middle class, you can become rich and famous but what really counts and what you can't have is breeding."
We seem to consider Obama as the "first black President," but does that make sense. His father was apparently of mixed heritage. Do black people say things like, "I don't trust Obama because he's white"?
We seem to consider Obama as the "first black President," but does that make sense. His father was apparently of mixed heritage. Do black people say things like, "I don't trust Obama because he's white"?
Sunday 8 April 2012
Workload
To hear teachers whinging about workload you would think they had a difficult job. They don't. Short hours, long holidays and an excessive pension are the reality they want ignored.
Too often you see an inability to organise. In most schools you will find classrooms where the teacher's desk is groaning under the weight of unmarked books, assorted paperwork, half eaten sandwiches, unwashed coffee mugs growing interesting cultures and many lines of Sellotape where cover lessons have been stuck down. You know from this that the teacher probably has a lot of time off with stress.
Too often you see an inability to organise. In most schools you will find classrooms where the teacher's desk is groaning under the weight of unmarked books, assorted paperwork, half eaten sandwiches, unwashed coffee mugs growing interesting cultures and many lines of Sellotape where cover lessons have been stuck down. You know from this that the teacher probably has a lot of time off with stress.
Friday 6 April 2012
Sometimes They Listen
There were two possible directions that the Government could send ICT. They could have tried to beef it up to make it a useful and worthwhile subject or leave it as a mixed bag with schools deciding how best to deploy their resources.
The first option would require strong subject expertise in all schools. Feedback from schools, Ofsted and the Universities confirms that ICT remains a Cinderella subject with islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity.
Several of the new free schools have taken an over my dead body approach to extending ICT beyond basic skills and Government advisers are clear that most schools can only offer the bare minimum.
http://www.westminsterforumprojects.co.uk/forums/slides/MarcCavey_March12.pdf
By reducing ICT to a Foundation subject, the Government have at last realised that improvements are unlikely to happen any time soon.
The same treatment for D&T seem rather more shortsighted. Practical skills are valuable, even for someone with a more academic interest.
The first option would require strong subject expertise in all schools. Feedback from schools, Ofsted and the Universities confirms that ICT remains a Cinderella subject with islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity.
Several of the new free schools have taken an over my dead body approach to extending ICT beyond basic skills and Government advisers are clear that most schools can only offer the bare minimum.
http://www.westminsterforumprojects.co.uk/forums/slides/MarcCavey_March12.pdf
By reducing ICT to a Foundation subject, the Government have at last realised that improvements are unlikely to happen any time soon.
The same treatment for D&T seem rather more shortsighted. Practical skills are valuable, even for someone with a more academic interest.
Lapped Zippers - The Movie
I was doing some sewing and needed a quick revision on a technique so I tried YouTube. There were a number of demonstrations but one thing I noticed very quickly was a difference in style. Almost invariably the young attractive women seemed to think they were making Lapped Zippers - The Movie. The demonstration was all about them smiling, talking, posing and hardly any care in demonstrating the techniques. Some even missed out essential steps, presumably assuming that you could figure it out for yourself.
The more mature women and the men addressed the task. You saw their faces at the start and from then on the focus was on the project explained in a careful step by step manner with close up shots where they were needed and a detailed explanation of why we were doing each step.
Thanks to someone sharing their expertise my IKEA rocking chair is now resplendent with superb box cushions which set it off nicely.
This got me thinking about my Worst Worksheet Ever and the modern approach to teaching which requires that for the students to own what they are doing, they have to figure it out for themselves. My worksheet was a step by step explanation of how to achieve an outcome. This is forbidden in the modern classroom. Auto-didacticism or some such idea prevails. It's just as well really because in a subject like ICT a lot of the teachers haven't worked it out for themselves yet.
A lot of real teaching is about sharing expertise. If it is practical or something like ICT, it is essential that there is an outcome. The YouTube demos were using random bits of cloth, but there was a valid assumption that you wanted to know the techniques for a complete project. Once you have mastered it for one project you can move on and use it again and again.
I can imagine our hunter gatherer ancestors using modern techniques.
Uggess: "Little Uggy is a long time catching those fish for dinner."
Ugg: "I just don't understand the boy. I told him where the river is and gave him some bits of wood and twine to make a fishing rod. He should have figured it out by now."
Uggess: "I know dear, it's not your fault, you did everything asked of you by the Oftribe inspectors."
Ugg: "I hope he's home soon, I'm getting hungry."
Uggess: "Those river crocodiles look really well fed. Do you think you could catch one so that I can make myself a new bag."
Ugg: "Yes dear, I'll figure it out tomorrow."
Uggess: (aside) "Husbands come and husbands go..."
The more mature women and the men addressed the task. You saw their faces at the start and from then on the focus was on the project explained in a careful step by step manner with close up shots where they were needed and a detailed explanation of why we were doing each step.
Thanks to someone sharing their expertise my IKEA rocking chair is now resplendent with superb box cushions which set it off nicely.
This got me thinking about my Worst Worksheet Ever and the modern approach to teaching which requires that for the students to own what they are doing, they have to figure it out for themselves. My worksheet was a step by step explanation of how to achieve an outcome. This is forbidden in the modern classroom. Auto-didacticism or some such idea prevails. It's just as well really because in a subject like ICT a lot of the teachers haven't worked it out for themselves yet.
A lot of real teaching is about sharing expertise. If it is practical or something like ICT, it is essential that there is an outcome. The YouTube demos were using random bits of cloth, but there was a valid assumption that you wanted to know the techniques for a complete project. Once you have mastered it for one project you can move on and use it again and again.
I can imagine our hunter gatherer ancestors using modern techniques.
Uggess: "Little Uggy is a long time catching those fish for dinner."
Ugg: "I just don't understand the boy. I told him where the river is and gave him some bits of wood and twine to make a fishing rod. He should have figured it out by now."
Uggess: "I know dear, it's not your fault, you did everything asked of you by the Oftribe inspectors."
Ugg: "I hope he's home soon, I'm getting hungry."
Uggess: "Those river crocodiles look really well fed. Do you think you could catch one so that I can make myself a new bag."
Ugg: "Yes dear, I'll figure it out tomorrow."
Uggess: (aside) "Husbands come and husbands go..."
Thursday 5 April 2012
Now They're All Doing It and it's not Fair
In the days of the 11+ the best schools would cram, they would have pupils practicing the tests over and over again. The tests were supposed to be secret, so where did they get their questions? he answer was that teachers would copy them from the set ones to be spirited duplicated to make the practice copies. If you asked if this was cheating they would tell you, "of course not, these children are the most intelligent, but we try to ensure there are no accidents.
Today there are more accusations of cheating and nobody is at all surprised. Teachers used to be regarded as professionals, pillars of the community and people who could be relied on, but they don't match that description now.
Anyone who has worked in a factory would know just where they are in a modern school. There is someone at the top who you rarely see. Perhaps Ofsted serves that role. The factory was run by foremen or chargehands. These were not necessarily the brightest but they were the most ambitious. They tended to be authoritarian and were often humourless and given to profanity to get the work done because, after all, they were paid to get results.
Walk into a headeacher's office and you'll probably meet a foreman, someone who's job is to get results. A headteacher, you will find, can be as cynical about his results as the foreman could be about his. Many of us have driven a Friday afternoon Ford.
Work in progress
Today there are more accusations of cheating and nobody is at all surprised. Teachers used to be regarded as professionals, pillars of the community and people who could be relied on, but they don't match that description now.
Anyone who has worked in a factory would know just where they are in a modern school. There is someone at the top who you rarely see. Perhaps Ofsted serves that role. The factory was run by foremen or chargehands. These were not necessarily the brightest but they were the most ambitious. They tended to be authoritarian and were often humourless and given to profanity to get the work done because, after all, they were paid to get results.
Walk into a headeacher's office and you'll probably meet a foreman, someone who's job is to get results. A headteacher, you will find, can be as cynical about his results as the foreman could be about his. Many of us have driven a Friday afternoon Ford.
Work in progress
Saturday 31 March 2012
ghoti
There can't be many people who haven't come across the title word, and if you haven't Google will quickly point you to a million or more people aching to tell you. I don't need to decode it. I know what it is. I know about Wymondham, fjord, tsunami, ubuntu, ... because I have learned the words by seeing them in use, not by trying to decode them.
Interestingly, a member of the Libertarian Alliance felt the need to try to explain why ghoti can't be decoded, missing the point that it is not decodable but is instantly recognised despite that.
Equally, there are probably very many words I recognise and know the meaning of which I may not know how to pronounce because I've never needed to. I'm happy to be corrected if I get one wrong. That's one of the ways you learn. In fact, I can drive on the continent using a foreign road map. I only need to see the name of a place once. I might have to hear it pronounced a few times.
I learned to read by the time I was five. This was not uncommon in my generation. I had a grandmother who was determined that her grandchildren would not be disadvantaged in the way that many of her peers had been. My early childhood was very much about devouring books. Every day there was a new one, from the library I was later to discover, and we would read it from cover to cover. As time passed the books could no longer be completed in a single session, but my confidence had grown and it wasn't long before I was reading increasingly independently.
My grandmother had no reading schemes and knew little of phonics. What she did know was that reading was rewarding both as a leisure activity and as an investment for the future. The important lesson I learned was that reading was something very special.
Reading is very special today, but not for the same reasons. Later this year, six and seven year olds will be tested on their ability to decode, that word again, a mixture of real and nonsense words. On the Government's practice materials site, the nonsense, "pseudo" words have pictures of imaginary animals next to them. Are the children to assume that the nonsense words are not really nonsense but refer to something invented or perhaps real? It doesn't matter because reading is not being tested, only decoding and only 40 words, 20 real and 20 nonsense. I prefer to describe them as nonsense. Pseudo gives them an implied quality they don't deserve.
An explanation of the illustrations for the pseudo words is given here,
"The attachment of an illustration to the psuedo words was in response to fears expressed by teachers that children would try to attach meaning to the psuedowords and so try to change them to words they recognised."
What is this saying? It is telling us that children will look for meaning in the pseudo words and to prevent them doing that it is necessary to embue the pseudo words with a meaning, however ridiculous that meaning is. Apparently, this is a "logical approach."
Children will search for meaning in words because that's the whole point of words.
There are three main processes in reading. The phonics, largely mechanical sounding of parts of words. Contextual clues which come from the text and the recognition of whole words. Each of these are important but people who are dependent themselves on sounding out seem to have assumed that it is the primary, perhaps the only way, it is done. This methodology reduces the importance of the other aspects. Phonics has been found to be an important determinant to reading speed when reading out loud, but many of us simply don't sound out, even silently, when we read to ourselves so that reading for meaning may be very different from reading for someone to hear, where diction is important.
I don't know for sure because I didn't keep a diary until I was eight, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that I had read more than 40 books, not 40 words, by that age and at an increasingly difficult standard, not like the appalling trivia which accompanies some phonics schemes today.
There is an important difference between reading and decoding. I have been known to sing and in different languages. It has taken a remarkably small amount of time and effort to be able to decode something like a song from Schubert's lieder. You can learn to sing these songs word perfectly but does that mean you are reading them? Of course not. Of course, you do need to know what they are about. You don't want to be singing a sad lament wearing a big grin.
Reading should be about access to real reading material, stories that children want to read. Decoding may be important for some words so knowing about phonics has a place but that place should be on route to reading and understanding books.
Some of the teaching of phonics goes far beyond simply sounding out letters. Children are required, in groups, to emphasise the sounds in various ways, often accompanied by gestures and waving. This seems to be an additional and unnecessary overhead to a scheme that is already diverting children away from. It is also making something you have to individual competence in into a group experience. You should be learning to share communication with others but reading is not usually a choir activity.
"But it's fun," the phonics ideologists will insist, "the children enjoy it." The good news is that they also enjoy reading when properly taught and motivated and they enjoy it on their own terms, not according to someone else's definition of fun.
I hadn't realised how strictly vetted reading had become until, after a creative writing session in a school. I offered the head a few of my books. She opened one, read the first six words and said, "no, we can't use this."
I asked why and she pointed to the word "fastidious". "Children this age can't be expected to read at that level," she explained, "it should say "careful" or "fussy".
I'm sorry, but the fastidious character was working in a laboratory, probably another unacceptable word, and I would expect something more than "careful" with "fussy" being completely wrong.
Why are we testing the ability of small children to decode 40 words? The answer is not nice. We can use their scores to label them. He''s a 39'er, she's a 22'er and poor little Kyle only managed 3. We can then assemble the scores from a school and use it tobeat to add to the already bloated system of league tables.
The system places an enormous amount of control in the hands of teachers. Because phonics is the overarching system of teaching reading, parents and children are discouraged from the kind of independent exploration of books. It is argued that many parents don't read to and with their children as a justification. Again we are dumbing down based on some perceived lowest common denominator.
When my children were in Primary school the headteacher introduced a new reading scheme. Parents were told that we could no longer read with our children because the materials at home were not compatible with school learning. After the letters went home a large crowd gathered outside the school in protest.
"Who's the expert here," demanded the headteacher.
A Professor from the local University put his hand up.
"If you don't leave and go to your homes I'll have no choice to call the police," she responded.
"It's OK, we're already here," two members of the crowd responded.
The headteacher, seeing that she was getting nowhere stormed back into the school. She left soon afterwards.
The difference with the phonics scheme is that it is imposed centrally with the support of ideologists who insist that they are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. I don't think anyone dismisses the usefulness of phonics as an adjunct to learning to read. A lot of the time you can decode a word and sometimes you can't. It is already accepted that there are "tricky" or "naughty" words that refuse to allow themselves to be decoded. You need different strategies to read these words. You need to internalise them. That's what you should be doing with all words.
Many adults, maybe most, read silently, not needing to sound out the words or individual phonemes but this has not always been so. The first recorded silent reader was St Ambrose. "When he read," said St Augustine, "his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."
What we want children to be able to do is for their eyes to scan the page and their hearts to seek out the meaning, but I have met so many children who are unable to do that. They have a decoding system standing between them, the words and the meaning and they stutter through texts in a way that causes them considerable frustration.
Talking to one ideologue about phonics I was told, "you're just like Michael Rosen." I thought she meant I was a great writer for a second, but she continued, "he's SWP so you can't take anything he says seriously. Reflecting on this thought I thought of the potential.
Do you want to save money by cancelling school swimming lessons? Just ring Michael Rosen and say, "Michael, do you think it's a good idea for schools to teach children to swim?" He's bound to say yes and the idea can be rejected as SWP.
"Michael, should we lower the school leaving age to 12?" He'll say "no," and you have another policy.
But why stop there? Millions could be saved by sacking hundreds of policy advisors and replacing them with Michael Rosen's telephone number.
"Michael, should we privatise the roads?"
"Michael, should we encourage people to hoard petrol to break the drivers strike."
"Michael, should we put VAT on hot pasties?"
"Michael, should we tax old people more?"
You've been blaming the Tories for these policies when it is plain to see that all they have done is to 'phone Michael Rosen to get his opinion and then done the opposite.
As an analogy, compare learning to read to learning to program a computer. You could try to learn all the programming instructions before embarking on your programming. Nobody I know has done that. If you want to learn to program you write a program. As your skill increases, the programs you can write become more complex and eventually it becomes second nature. Does that mean that you now know every instruction? Of course not. It means that you know how to find out if you need to know.
The same is true of reading. A child reads a book, initially with an adult and gradually builds their vocabulary. Many of the words they will know from speech and will quickly recognise familiar ones. Eventually it will become second nature and with reading a pleasure because it hasn't been preceded by boring drills, new words are something to discover rather than fear. There are dictionaries and thesaurus for new and unfamiliar words and children enjoy exploring them if they have been encouraged properly.
It's like reading the Watchtower, reading these authoritarian evangelists:
http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/marleys-ghost-kept-awake-at-night-in.html
It's worrying that they make the Jehovah's Witnesses seem intelligent.
Since St. Ambrose there has been a clear distinction between reading aloud and reading for meaning. This seems to have been discarded on an assumption that we all read by decoding. Reading aloud is clearly different. As an experiment, my wife read a single page aloud in the time I read eleven silently. Swapping places, she read eight silently to my one read aloud. The fundamentalists would still insist that we were doing the same thing. (we wore earplugs to avoid distraction.)
"Reading is not a natural process," insist the fundamentalists and this belief justifies an authoritarian and censoring approach to teaching. They are not just teaching reading but "how to speak properly," implying among other things an attack on accents and idiomatic language. I've referred elsewhere that the word fastidious is not deemed suitable for children under the age of eleven, being a too complex concept and having too many syllables.
Is reading natural? Obviously we have to learn to do it but there are lots of things we have to learn. Reading is simply an extension of our profound ability to recognise patterns. We even see them where none really exist. "That cloud looks like..."
Reading should exploit the natural desire to find patterns. The modern phonics approach subverts it demanding that there is one way and one way only. Gibberish first, meaning later.
(work in progress. Some disjointedness expected.)
Interestingly, a member of the Libertarian Alliance felt the need to try to explain why ghoti can't be decoded, missing the point that it is not decodable but is instantly recognised despite that.
Equally, there are probably very many words I recognise and know the meaning of which I may not know how to pronounce because I've never needed to. I'm happy to be corrected if I get one wrong. That's one of the ways you learn. In fact, I can drive on the continent using a foreign road map. I only need to see the name of a place once. I might have to hear it pronounced a few times.
I learned to read by the time I was five. This was not uncommon in my generation. I had a grandmother who was determined that her grandchildren would not be disadvantaged in the way that many of her peers had been. My early childhood was very much about devouring books. Every day there was a new one, from the library I was later to discover, and we would read it from cover to cover. As time passed the books could no longer be completed in a single session, but my confidence had grown and it wasn't long before I was reading increasingly independently.
My grandmother had no reading schemes and knew little of phonics. What she did know was that reading was rewarding both as a leisure activity and as an investment for the future. The important lesson I learned was that reading was something very special.
Reading is very special today, but not for the same reasons. Later this year, six and seven year olds will be tested on their ability to decode, that word again, a mixture of real and nonsense words. On the Government's practice materials site, the nonsense, "pseudo" words have pictures of imaginary animals next to them. Are the children to assume that the nonsense words are not really nonsense but refer to something invented or perhaps real? It doesn't matter because reading is not being tested, only decoding and only 40 words, 20 real and 20 nonsense. I prefer to describe them as nonsense. Pseudo gives them an implied quality they don't deserve.
An explanation of the illustrations for the pseudo words is given here,
"The attachment of an illustration to the psuedo words was in response to fears expressed by teachers that children would try to attach meaning to the psuedowords and so try to change them to words they recognised."
What is this saying? It is telling us that children will look for meaning in the pseudo words and to prevent them doing that it is necessary to embue the pseudo words with a meaning, however ridiculous that meaning is. Apparently, this is a "logical approach."
Children will search for meaning in words because that's the whole point of words.
There are three main processes in reading. The phonics, largely mechanical sounding of parts of words. Contextual clues which come from the text and the recognition of whole words. Each of these are important but people who are dependent themselves on sounding out seem to have assumed that it is the primary, perhaps the only way, it is done. This methodology reduces the importance of the other aspects. Phonics has been found to be an important determinant to reading speed when reading out loud, but many of us simply don't sound out, even silently, when we read to ourselves so that reading for meaning may be very different from reading for someone to hear, where diction is important.
I don't know for sure because I didn't keep a diary until I was eight, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that I had read more than 40 books, not 40 words, by that age and at an increasingly difficult standard, not like the appalling trivia which accompanies some phonics schemes today.
There is an important difference between reading and decoding. I have been known to sing and in different languages. It has taken a remarkably small amount of time and effort to be able to decode something like a song from Schubert's lieder. You can learn to sing these songs word perfectly but does that mean you are reading them? Of course not. Of course, you do need to know what they are about. You don't want to be singing a sad lament wearing a big grin.
Reading should be about access to real reading material, stories that children want to read. Decoding may be important for some words so knowing about phonics has a place but that place should be on route to reading and understanding books.
Some of the teaching of phonics goes far beyond simply sounding out letters. Children are required, in groups, to emphasise the sounds in various ways, often accompanied by gestures and waving. This seems to be an additional and unnecessary overhead to a scheme that is already diverting children away from. It is also making something you have to individual competence in into a group experience. You should be learning to share communication with others but reading is not usually a choir activity.
"But it's fun," the phonics ideologists will insist, "the children enjoy it." The good news is that they also enjoy reading when properly taught and motivated and they enjoy it on their own terms, not according to someone else's definition of fun.
I hadn't realised how strictly vetted reading had become until, after a creative writing session in a school. I offered the head a few of my books. She opened one, read the first six words and said, "no, we can't use this."
I asked why and she pointed to the word "fastidious". "Children this age can't be expected to read at that level," she explained, "it should say "careful" or "fussy".
I'm sorry, but the fastidious character was working in a laboratory, probably another unacceptable word, and I would expect something more than "careful" with "fussy" being completely wrong.
Why are we testing the ability of small children to decode 40 words? The answer is not nice. We can use their scores to label them. He''s a 39'er, she's a 22'er and poor little Kyle only managed 3. We can then assemble the scores from a school and use it to
The system places an enormous amount of control in the hands of teachers. Because phonics is the overarching system of teaching reading, parents and children are discouraged from the kind of independent exploration of books. It is argued that many parents don't read to and with their children as a justification. Again we are dumbing down based on some perceived lowest common denominator.
When my children were in Primary school the headteacher introduced a new reading scheme. Parents were told that we could no longer read with our children because the materials at home were not compatible with school learning. After the letters went home a large crowd gathered outside the school in protest.
"Who's the expert here," demanded the headteacher.
A Professor from the local University put his hand up.
"If you don't leave and go to your homes I'll have no choice to call the police," she responded.
"It's OK, we're already here," two members of the crowd responded.
The headteacher, seeing that she was getting nowhere stormed back into the school. She left soon afterwards.
The difference with the phonics scheme is that it is imposed centrally with the support of ideologists who insist that they are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. I don't think anyone dismisses the usefulness of phonics as an adjunct to learning to read. A lot of the time you can decode a word and sometimes you can't. It is already accepted that there are "tricky" or "naughty" words that refuse to allow themselves to be decoded. You need different strategies to read these words. You need to internalise them. That's what you should be doing with all words.
Many adults, maybe most, read silently, not needing to sound out the words or individual phonemes but this has not always been so. The first recorded silent reader was St Ambrose. "When he read," said St Augustine, "his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."
What we want children to be able to do is for their eyes to scan the page and their hearts to seek out the meaning, but I have met so many children who are unable to do that. They have a decoding system standing between them, the words and the meaning and they stutter through texts in a way that causes them considerable frustration.
Talking to one ideologue about phonics I was told, "you're just like Michael Rosen." I thought she meant I was a great writer for a second, but she continued, "he's SWP so you can't take anything he says seriously. Reflecting on this thought I thought of the potential.
Do you want to save money by cancelling school swimming lessons? Just ring Michael Rosen and say, "Michael, do you think it's a good idea for schools to teach children to swim?" He's bound to say yes and the idea can be rejected as SWP.
"Michael, should we lower the school leaving age to 12?" He'll say "no," and you have another policy.
But why stop there? Millions could be saved by sacking hundreds of policy advisors and replacing them with Michael Rosen's telephone number.
"Michael, should we privatise the roads?"
"Michael, should we encourage people to hoard petrol to break the drivers strike."
"Michael, should we put VAT on hot pasties?"
"Michael, should we tax old people more?"
You've been blaming the Tories for these policies when it is plain to see that all they have done is to 'phone Michael Rosen to get his opinion and then done the opposite.
As an analogy, compare learning to read to learning to program a computer. You could try to learn all the programming instructions before embarking on your programming. Nobody I know has done that. If you want to learn to program you write a program. As your skill increases, the programs you can write become more complex and eventually it becomes second nature. Does that mean that you now know every instruction? Of course not. It means that you know how to find out if you need to know.
The same is true of reading. A child reads a book, initially with an adult and gradually builds their vocabulary. Many of the words they will know from speech and will quickly recognise familiar ones. Eventually it will become second nature and with reading a pleasure because it hasn't been preceded by boring drills, new words are something to discover rather than fear. There are dictionaries and thesaurus for new and unfamiliar words and children enjoy exploring them if they have been encouraged properly.
It's like reading the Watchtower, reading these authoritarian evangelists:
http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/marleys-ghost-kept-awake-at-night-in.html
It's worrying that they make the Jehovah's Witnesses seem intelligent.
Since St. Ambrose there has been a clear distinction between reading aloud and reading for meaning. This seems to have been discarded on an assumption that we all read by decoding. Reading aloud is clearly different. As an experiment, my wife read a single page aloud in the time I read eleven silently. Swapping places, she read eight silently to my one read aloud. The fundamentalists would still insist that we were doing the same thing. (we wore earplugs to avoid distraction.)
"Reading is not a natural process," insist the fundamentalists and this belief justifies an authoritarian and censoring approach to teaching. They are not just teaching reading but "how to speak properly," implying among other things an attack on accents and idiomatic language. I've referred elsewhere that the word fastidious is not deemed suitable for children under the age of eleven, being a too complex concept and having too many syllables.
Is reading natural? Obviously we have to learn to do it but there are lots of things we have to learn. Reading is simply an extension of our profound ability to recognise patterns. We even see them where none really exist. "That cloud looks like..."
Reading should exploit the natural desire to find patterns. The modern phonics approach subverts it demanding that there is one way and one way only. Gibberish first, meaning later.
(work in progress. Some disjointedness expected.)
Friday 30 March 2012
Of Mice, Men and Celibates
I'm not sure how I got roped into three weeks work with some North African miners in Namur and Charleroi, but it was an interesting period. I discovered Belgian chips fried in horse fat and learned some French.
In the morning I did an overtime shift on ward three which was easy because they were all long term patients, middle aged and mostly quite stable. Some of them needed to be shaved before being served breakfast.
A rather dull morning was enlivened by Charlie, a former Catholic Jesuit priest who was a GPI, General Paralysis of the Insane, the Christian disease, the Black Lion or neurosyphilis as it's usually known today. Charlie had discovered a pronouncement by the Pope about Celibacy in the paper. It must have been the Telegraph because every ward had a copy of it.
Charlie was in a marvellous humour, swearing about the Pope and his dishonesty. In his view and experience, the priesthood and celibacy was about not getting married not about not having sex. He always boasted that being a priest gave you access to all the sex you could ever want. He must have got the disease that made him mad somehow.
So on 24th June 19xx I set off for Belgium on the train and overnight ferry. At the station I stopped at W. H. Smith and bought two books for the journey, Of Mice and Men and Three Men in a Boat. I read the first on the way to Dover and the second on the way to Charleroi. The Belgians must have wondered why I was laughing so much. Jerome's book remains one of my favourites.
The reason I mention Steinbeck's book is that it is a set work in a great many school and students don't so much read it as have it inflicted on them. They see the film, then read a chapter of the book every lesson, analysing the plot and discussing the character of Curly's wife, searching for metaphors and coming up with alternative endings.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book when I read it in just over an hour on a train. I understood it and remembered it well enough when called upon to teach it but I am forced to ask what purpose is served by hours of forced labour trying to drag out additional meaning from students who lose interest by the hour.
Surely more purpose would be served by having them read it for themselves and then recording their feelings and interpretations rather then being forced to regurgitate the meanings given by the teacher from the scheme of work.
In the morning I did an overtime shift on ward three which was easy because they were all long term patients, middle aged and mostly quite stable. Some of them needed to be shaved before being served breakfast.
A rather dull morning was enlivened by Charlie, a former Catholic Jesuit priest who was a GPI, General Paralysis of the Insane, the Christian disease, the Black Lion or neurosyphilis as it's usually known today. Charlie had discovered a pronouncement by the Pope about Celibacy in the paper. It must have been the Telegraph because every ward had a copy of it.
Charlie was in a marvellous humour, swearing about the Pope and his dishonesty. In his view and experience, the priesthood and celibacy was about not getting married not about not having sex. He always boasted that being a priest gave you access to all the sex you could ever want. He must have got the disease that made him mad somehow.
So on 24th June 19xx I set off for Belgium on the train and overnight ferry. At the station I stopped at W. H. Smith and bought two books for the journey, Of Mice and Men and Three Men in a Boat. I read the first on the way to Dover and the second on the way to Charleroi. The Belgians must have wondered why I was laughing so much. Jerome's book remains one of my favourites.
The reason I mention Steinbeck's book is that it is a set work in a great many school and students don't so much read it as have it inflicted on them. They see the film, then read a chapter of the book every lesson, analysing the plot and discussing the character of Curly's wife, searching for metaphors and coming up with alternative endings.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book when I read it in just over an hour on a train. I understood it and remembered it well enough when called upon to teach it but I am forced to ask what purpose is served by hours of forced labour trying to drag out additional meaning from students who lose interest by the hour.
Surely more purpose would be served by having them read it for themselves and then recording their feelings and interpretations rather then being forced to regurgitate the meanings given by the teacher from the scheme of work.
Thursday 29 March 2012
You Were Seen!
Mr. Traylen was one of those black and white headmasters. There was praise or the cane and nothing in between. He saw it as his duty, to paraphrase Bentham, "to cane rogues honest". In Mr Traylen's eyes the Irish were rogues by definition. I was a rogue, along with my brothers, because my dad was a rogue.
Every morning the variety of rogues were lined up outside Mr. Traylen's office and given one stroke of the cane, not because we had done anything wrong, "but to remind you what will happen if you do." It seemed to make sense at the time.
It was Thursday 17th March 19xx. We were lined up for our reminders as usual. "It's your special day," Mr. Traylen told the Irish contingent and gave them two strokes as a treat. Everyone else had one stroke except me. I was taken by one ear and dragged under protest to the hall where the rest of the school was waiting. I was the first order of business.
"This child has destroyed a ladder," declared Mr. Traylen, pointing at me.
"No I didn't," I protested in an ineffective eight year old voice.
"Don't lie boy," boomed Mr. Traylen, "you were seen."
It's still true today that answering a headteacher back makes them even madder. "You'll get an extra stroke for lying," he promised.
I was bent over a chair and given four strokes of the cane on my backside for the destruction of a ladder and, "this is for lying," stormed Mr. Traylen, delivering a fifth, much harder stroke.
There were single strokes of the cane delivered in public from time to time but my flogging was the only one I remember or recorded of that severity.
I was sent in tears to my place and ordered to sob in silence. We sang All Things Bright and Beautiful, and were then told about the importance of telling the truth with several reference being made to me.
The only things about this story that I lack are the facts about the ladder. I did not know then and never discovered what ladder was destroyed, when and how. It would appear that I had been identified as the miscreant, although it is equally likely that I was picked out as a likely suspect.
In those days if a crime was committed, someone had to pay and it was less important that justice was done than that something resembling justice was seen to be done.
Every morning the variety of rogues were lined up outside Mr. Traylen's office and given one stroke of the cane, not because we had done anything wrong, "but to remind you what will happen if you do." It seemed to make sense at the time.
It was Thursday 17th March 19xx. We were lined up for our reminders as usual. "It's your special day," Mr. Traylen told the Irish contingent and gave them two strokes as a treat. Everyone else had one stroke except me. I was taken by one ear and dragged under protest to the hall where the rest of the school was waiting. I was the first order of business.
"This child has destroyed a ladder," declared Mr. Traylen, pointing at me.
"No I didn't," I protested in an ineffective eight year old voice.
"Don't lie boy," boomed Mr. Traylen, "you were seen."
It's still true today that answering a headteacher back makes them even madder. "You'll get an extra stroke for lying," he promised.
I was bent over a chair and given four strokes of the cane on my backside for the destruction of a ladder and, "this is for lying," stormed Mr. Traylen, delivering a fifth, much harder stroke.
There were single strokes of the cane delivered in public from time to time but my flogging was the only one I remember or recorded of that severity.
I was sent in tears to my place and ordered to sob in silence. We sang All Things Bright and Beautiful, and were then told about the importance of telling the truth with several reference being made to me.
The only things about this story that I lack are the facts about the ladder. I did not know then and never discovered what ladder was destroyed, when and how. It would appear that I had been identified as the miscreant, although it is equally likely that I was picked out as a likely suspect.
In those days if a crime was committed, someone had to pay and it was less important that justice was done than that something resembling justice was seen to be done.
Monday 19 March 2012
My First Full Time Job
The reason for this article was initially as a response to someone on a forum who insisted that as a result of the 1944 Education Act, every child left school at 15 or later because 15 was the school leaving. This was rarely the case because for many years post war industry demanded workers and teenagers were available.
I discussed this with a few friends from the same generation and they all agreed that it was not unusual for people to leave school as soon as a job came up. Michael, left school at 13 when an apprenticeship became available at a local printers. James worked increasingly in the family funeral business and became full time by the time he was 14. The education system recognised the sense in it.
It was Monday 12th June 19xx and I was 14 years old. I walked from Temple Meads Station and arrived here, Broad Quay just after 8. This is an older photo because there was another office/warehouse building to the left of the one in the picture. I was paid £4 - 1s - 6d per week.
To get this job required that I attended an interview and I had to prove I was reasonably literate, as did almost everyone applying for a job at that time. My literacy test required me to write a thousand word review of a book I had recently read. I chose to write about Jack London's White Fang.
I had a range of duties. From 8:30 I worked in the post room helping sort the post and then delivering it to the various departments and managers. All the senior managers would also receive a Financial Times which they used to check commodity prices. Towards the end of the day I would be responsible for franking outgoing mail then taking it across the road to the Post Office.
During the lift operator's lunchtime I would operate the Executive lift which was just up some steps after you passed the doorkeeper. Both these men wore a uniform but I didn't have one for my one hour stint. The lift wasn't automatic and you had to respond to calls and take people to the floor they wanted. This lift was for important people. Everyone else used the door and the automatic lift in the other building. Everyone, without fail, felt the need to comment, "I suppose this job has it's ups and downs."
My main job was assisting with the warehousing and movement of stock samples at Broad Quay and sometimes working in the main warehouse near Old Market.
Some of the managers liked to tell you about what they did. On one occasion I had to deliver some marmalade to a manager. He held up two jars and said, "what's the difference?"
"One's darker than the other," I replied.
"But do you know why," he asked.
I didn't and he explained that the lighter one was made with whole oranges including the juice while the other was just pulp after the juice was removed.
Another manager showed me the commodity prices in the Financial Times. "This is how we make sure we're charging the right price for things like sugar in the shops," he said.
Outside the door at the Broad Quay building in the evening was a newspaper seller selling the Evening Post. He wore a flat cap and a duffle coat tied around the middle with string. I assumed he was very poor. One evening I was late leaving work. I bought a paper and the newspaper seller offered me a lift home. We walked round the corner and I had a ride in an Armstrong Siddley. It transpired that his family owned several newsagents shops and he was quite well off. He had worked the Broad Quay pitch for 30 years. He pointed out that you probably would not sell as many newspapers wearing a 3 piece suit..
I discussed this with a few friends from the same generation and they all agreed that it was not unusual for people to leave school as soon as a job came up. Michael, left school at 13 when an apprenticeship became available at a local printers. James worked increasingly in the family funeral business and became full time by the time he was 14. The education system recognised the sense in it.
It was Monday 12th June 19xx and I was 14 years old. I walked from Temple Meads Station and arrived here, Broad Quay just after 8. This is an older photo because there was another office/warehouse building to the left of the one in the picture. I was paid £4 - 1s - 6d per week.
To get this job required that I attended an interview and I had to prove I was reasonably literate, as did almost everyone applying for a job at that time. My literacy test required me to write a thousand word review of a book I had recently read. I chose to write about Jack London's White Fang.
I had a range of duties. From 8:30 I worked in the post room helping sort the post and then delivering it to the various departments and managers. All the senior managers would also receive a Financial Times which they used to check commodity prices. Towards the end of the day I would be responsible for franking outgoing mail then taking it across the road to the Post Office.
During the lift operator's lunchtime I would operate the Executive lift which was just up some steps after you passed the doorkeeper. Both these men wore a uniform but I didn't have one for my one hour stint. The lift wasn't automatic and you had to respond to calls and take people to the floor they wanted. This lift was for important people. Everyone else used the door and the automatic lift in the other building. Everyone, without fail, felt the need to comment, "I suppose this job has it's ups and downs."
My main job was assisting with the warehousing and movement of stock samples at Broad Quay and sometimes working in the main warehouse near Old Market.
Some of the managers liked to tell you about what they did. On one occasion I had to deliver some marmalade to a manager. He held up two jars and said, "what's the difference?"
"One's darker than the other," I replied.
"But do you know why," he asked.
I didn't and he explained that the lighter one was made with whole oranges including the juice while the other was just pulp after the juice was removed.
Another manager showed me the commodity prices in the Financial Times. "This is how we make sure we're charging the right price for things like sugar in the shops," he said.
Outside the door at the Broad Quay building in the evening was a newspaper seller selling the Evening Post. He wore a flat cap and a duffle coat tied around the middle with string. I assumed he was very poor. One evening I was late leaving work. I bought a paper and the newspaper seller offered me a lift home. We walked round the corner and I had a ride in an Armstrong Siddley. It transpired that his family owned several newsagents shops and he was quite well off. He had worked the Broad Quay pitch for 30 years. He pointed out that you probably would not sell as many newspapers wearing a 3 piece suit..
Wednesday 15 February 2012
I Want to be Lord of the Manor
I want to be Lord of the Manor,
I want to be King of the pile,
I'm fed up with being a yokel
And chewing a straw on the stile.
I want to look down on you peasants,
(As soon as I'm not one myself).
I want to eat fois gras and pheasant
And have more than beans on the shelf.
I want to stand out in public,
And have people say "there's a toff".
I want to be someone important
Like Royalty, Nobility or Cloth.
I really am Lord of the Manor,
At least so my mum used to say,
As she told of the nights when she and the Lord
Would go for a roll in the hay.
I'll one day be Lord of the Manor,
As soon as my numbers come up,
And you won't catch me talking to you lot,
Or drinking cheap wine from a cup.
I want to be King of the pile,
I'm fed up with being a yokel
And chewing a straw on the stile.
I want to look down on you peasants,
(As soon as I'm not one myself).
I want to eat fois gras and pheasant
And have more than beans on the shelf.
I want to stand out in public,
And have people say "there's a toff".
I want to be someone important
Like Royalty, Nobility or Cloth.
I really am Lord of the Manor,
At least so my mum used to say,
As she told of the nights when she and the Lord
Would go for a roll in the hay.
I'll one day be Lord of the Manor,
As soon as my numbers come up,
And you won't catch me talking to you lot,
Or drinking cheap wine from a cup.
Saturday 11 February 2012
Stone Cold Stress
I met a teacher from the 'Stone Cold' school a couple of days ago and suffered a real ear bending about the stress I'd caused the teacher I'd covered. She was, apparently, almost permanently in tears and unable to work because of the negativity resulting from my worksheet. I explained that it wasn't my worksheet but he wasn't listening. "Carol would never do something like that," he harangued, "and it's a disgrace that you refuse to accept responsibility."
Not only has this "poor woman" wrecked my teaching career, but she's getting sick pay and counselling for the stress she is suffering.
Not only has this "poor woman" wrecked my teaching career, but she's getting sick pay and counselling for the stress she is suffering.
Thursday 9 February 2012
Telling Tales
Sometimes teachers can get uptight about things that are not worth the effort of being angry about.
I was covering year four for the day and in the afternoon the year 4 co-ordinator said, "can you tell them a traditional tale and have them make illustrations? There are plenty of stories in the library."
I have a head full of traditional tales so it was a matter of deciding which to tell. At the end of lunchtime, the teacher came to me and bellowed, "you didn't go to the library, how can you tell a story?"
"I remember them," I told her.
"How on earth can you tell a traditional tale properly without the book?" she demanded.
"I just can," I said, but she thrust a book into my hand anyway.
"Read this," she ordered and stomped off.
So I told the story. I didn't read it because reading from a book destroys the storytelling experience. Every time you tell a story it is a little different. It's a different audience and experience tells you when to ask them questions like, "What do you think they did then?" You learn when to characterise, when to add a little banter and when to draw on the kids for the animal noises.
Do they teach storytelling? It's such a vital skill. If you were to pull out a book or notes at the storytelling circle they would show you the door. School is no different.
I was covering year four for the day and in the afternoon the year 4 co-ordinator said, "can you tell them a traditional tale and have them make illustrations? There are plenty of stories in the library."
I have a head full of traditional tales so it was a matter of deciding which to tell. At the end of lunchtime, the teacher came to me and bellowed, "you didn't go to the library, how can you tell a story?"
"I remember them," I told her.
"How on earth can you tell a traditional tale properly without the book?" she demanded.
"I just can," I said, but she thrust a book into my hand anyway.
"Read this," she ordered and stomped off.
So I told the story. I didn't read it because reading from a book destroys the storytelling experience. Every time you tell a story it is a little different. It's a different audience and experience tells you when to ask them questions like, "What do you think they did then?" You learn when to characterise, when to add a little banter and when to draw on the kids for the animal noises.
Do they teach storytelling? It's such a vital skill. If you were to pull out a book or notes at the storytelling circle they would show you the door. School is no different.
Wednesday 8 February 2012
Stone Cold
One of the very worst incidents in a long supply teaching career is the most recent, which has me banned from working in one County.
I was doing a day in a school I had been in several times before. It was last period on a Friday taking year 9 for English.
A lesson plan and worksheets had been left for a lesson on Robert Swindells' novel, Stone Cold. The book is very dark, with themes of abuse, homelessness, mental illness and murder, but seems a popular choice in many schools. The worksheet examined responses to an abusive relationship and I had no reason to suspect that there was anything untoward about it. The language was a bit sleazy, but nothing that a year 9 student would be unaware of.
Last period is often lively and as part of the lesson I read out the worksheet. The students immediately started laughing and jeering and the TA, who was supporting a student, took the student and ran from the room. She reported that the worksheet was “disgusting” and made her feel sick.
Once they settled back down, the students did as much work as might be expected.
The first I knew about a problem was from my agency who had suspended me. I was accused of taking in and using a “disgusting and disgraceful” worksheet and using it instead of the lesson I had been left. It emerged that the TA had complained, parents had complained, a report had been made to the police. As a result, the LA had also been informed and I was banned from working in any County schools. A referral was also made to the GTCE and I am awaiting the outcome of that.
Like any organised supply teacher, I have prepared lessons which I carry with me. What I don't do, unless on a long term cover, is to prepare lessons on topics which will be on the school's Scheme of Work. You cannot second guess another teacher's approach. I have, though, read all the books I am likely to meet in an English lesson because it makes it easier to answer questions and suggest possible meanings.
The “disgusting” worksheet raises a number of questions. To have created such a worksheet would suggest that I knew that I would be teaching Stone Cold in a particular lesson and was willing to disrupt someone else's Scheme of Work. Why should I do this, given that it would be a disciplinary offence? I have been unable to obtain a copy of the lesson I was supposed to have delivered.
There are two consequences of this situation. Firstly, my name is blackened by a malicious libel. Secondly, there was no similar disciplinary action against the real author of the worksheet who remains in post.
Either the Headteacher has accepted the absent English teacher's claim to have no knowledge of the worksheet or has decided to use me as a scapegoat to protect a colleague. Neither is acceptable.
You want to see the worksheet? Here it is:
Set: A cut-away house is shown on stage, containing two rooms: the
living room and a teenage boy’s bedroom. The lounge is filled with
cigarette smoke, and the sports news blares out from the TV.
A fat, middle aged man is slumped on the sofa. He is surrounded by
crushed beer cans and he is currently asleep.
The boy speaks first. He is talking to himself and staring in the mirror.
LINK: My life is fascinating. (Snorts in derision). Bloody fascinating.
Not.
He freezes whilst the man on the sofa comes to life.
VINCE: (Belches loudly). God, I must’ve been asleep. (rubs head,
disorientated) What the….(Smiles proudly at a memory). I told her, I did!
She can’t expect to walk around my house, the little tart, without getting
‘attention’….(sniggers)….eh up lass…..give us a feel of those!!! (Laughs
like a drain)…..come on….don’t be shy…come and give your old step
dad a cuddle…..I expect she will be back for more….they always are!
Just like her mum! (Rolls over and sleeps again)
CAROLE enters, her face streaked with tears and with her arms wrapped
defensively around herself.
CAROLE: (To the sleeping Vince) I said no! wait till Mum finds out!
You slob! You dirty slob! You will be the one leaving, not me! You make
me feel sick! Sick! (She aims a pathetic slap at his face but he is dead to
the world).
Exit Carole to Link’s bedroom
They embrace, each looking away. How does the conversation go from
here?
Friday 3 February 2012
Olympic excuses
You won't find Tommy Atkins as one of the boxers in the British Olympic team. A few years ago he had the makings of a contender, but he just didn't have the attitude or discipline to keep at it.
I met Tommy when he was in year 10. He was regarded as able but lazy. He was also a bully.
I was covering a rather dull English lesson when a fight broke out. Tommy was laying into two students at once and they were making a poor effort at defending themselves. Unwisely, I stepped between the fighters and Tommy punched me very hard in the chest.
The TA removed Tommy and I spoke to the other two contestants. They insisted that nothing would happen if they complained, but both provided statements. I also wrote a statement and they were sent to the Head of Year.
At break, I was surprised to see Tommy Atkins swaggering around the playground. He made a rude remark as he passed me.
I sought out the Head of Year and asked what was happening.
“Nothing,” he told me.
“He assaulted me and two students,” I replied, “you can't just let that pass.”
“Look here,” said the Head of Year, “Tommy Atkins is a talented boxer and is predicted for a place in the British Olympic Team.”
“But he also assaulted a teacher and two students,” I protested.
“Do you really think we're going to let a Supply Teacher stand in the way of one of our students being in the Olympics?” he responded and at that walked off.
I spoke later to the two students who, quite correctly, told me, “we told you so.”
I met Tommy when he was in year 10. He was regarded as able but lazy. He was also a bully.
I was covering a rather dull English lesson when a fight broke out. Tommy was laying into two students at once and they were making a poor effort at defending themselves. Unwisely, I stepped between the fighters and Tommy punched me very hard in the chest.
The TA removed Tommy and I spoke to the other two contestants. They insisted that nothing would happen if they complained, but both provided statements. I also wrote a statement and they were sent to the Head of Year.
At break, I was surprised to see Tommy Atkins swaggering around the playground. He made a rude remark as he passed me.
I sought out the Head of Year and asked what was happening.
“Nothing,” he told me.
“He assaulted me and two students,” I replied, “you can't just let that pass.”
“Look here,” said the Head of Year, “Tommy Atkins is a talented boxer and is predicted for a place in the British Olympic Team.”
“But he also assaulted a teacher and two students,” I protested.
“Do you really think we're going to let a Supply Teacher stand in the way of one of our students being in the Olympics?” he responded and at that walked off.
I spoke later to the two students who, quite correctly, told me, “we told you so.”
Thursday 2 February 2012
Racist Tie
 | For my supply teaching I wear a smart shirt, trousers and shoes, sometimes a jumper and always a tie. Most of my ties are what you might call entertaining, with a lot having animal images like giraffes, elephants, hippos, a tiger, Noah's ark and this one, sheep. I rarely wear a tie other than for work so wearing silly ones is a little statement. I was working with a year 9 class covering a science lesson when one lad piped up, "your tie is racist, sir." I told him not to be so silly, the lesson passed quietly enough and the comment seemed to be forgotten. At break I was called into the headteacher's office. "I'm sorry, he said, but I have to investigate a racist incident." I said that I was not aware of any such incident, but he pointed and said, "there have been complaints about your racist tie." It has sheep on it," I replied. But one of them is black," he said, observantly. I tried to point out that it was a bit of fun, but he would have none of it. "a racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person," he declared. Who is the victim?" I asked. "Fortunately, there are no victims," he said, "or it would be a police matter, but several of our students were very distressed by it." "Can you explain," I asked, "how a tie with cartoon sheep on it could possibly distress anyone." Quick as a flash he had the answer. "It's racist graffiti, wearing racist badges or insignia and other provocative behaviour." No amount of protest on my part could persuade the man that it was a novelty tie and nothing more. He was working by the book. Several students had already provided statements and I was required to prepare one too. I simply wrote the statement, "I came to school today wearing a novelty tie containing cartoon pictures of sheep," which I then signed and dated. The headteacher wanted more detail but I refused to add any more. He was angry about my "blase attitude." I reluctantly agreed to be photographed wearing the tie. The headteacher had to write a statement of his own, inform the parents of the distressed students about his actions, submit a report to the Local Authority and then raise the matter at the next Governors meeting. Dealing with me was easy. Having signed my statement I was sent home and my agency informed of my racist behaviour. As far as I am concerned, the colour of sheep is of little consequence. I cannot imagine that they care what colour they are and they probably taste the same with mint sauce. I don't know how many hours were wasted on this racist incident, but it does a disservice to all the victims of real incidents to be lumped together with something so trivial. |
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