The Crumbling Castle of Crawford

Many schools use the AQA English Literature specification for GCSE, and will be used to teaching Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ as part of the Conflict and Power cluster of poems. It seems to be one of the more popular poems, and this might relate to the poem’s memorable rhythm - this certainly seemed to be the case in a video I saw a few months ago of some school students vigorously reciting it in their playground in unison with their teacher.  English teachers love complicated terminology, and like me, you have probably taught your students that the energetic rhythm is achieved through Tennyson’s use of dactylic dimeter ( BAH-ba-ba BAH-ba-ba ). When I first started teaching this poem, I would tell students that this was to evoke the sound of the Light Brigade galloping towards the enemy on horseback.  This isn’t wrong, but I found that my students would tag this on to their answers - seemingly just so they could use the complicated terminology. Students were no...

What is the best way to make it very likely that a child will become a teenager who is good at English? Encouraging a love of reading and good reading habits would be at the top of my list. Think about the students who excel at English in your class - it’s very probable that they have had positive experiences with reading from a very young age. These students are often very easy to teach. They can understand and use many words. They get that texts are deliberately constructed to create effects. They have more powerful knowledge and cultural capital than their peers. But let’s face it, this isn’t what most of your students are like. If your students are anything like mine (I currently work in a larger-than-average comprehensive secondary school in Derbyshire), most of them will not read anywhere near the amount that you would like them to. Let me be clear; this isn’t the fault of schools. Many schools - like mine - have an excellent library and library staff, and teachers who care passi...

This is the second blog post in my ‘How to read like an English teacher’ series. The first offered the strategy to try something else . For the next one, all your students need is a little empathy. It’s called put yourself in the character’s shoes . Put yourself in the character’s shoes Your students are likely to know that the idiom ‘put yourself in someone else’s shoes’ means to imagine things from another person’s perspective. This can be done with characters in works of fiction, so that we can better understand how their thoughts, actions, and dialogue have been represented by the author. This can be demonstrated with a text that is included on an AQA GCSE English Language specimen paper: Alex Cold . In the extract, Alex Cold’s mother is seriously unwell, and he is eating breakfast with his father and siblings. Question 4 on this exam paper asks the following: A student said ‘This part of the story, set during breakfast time, shows that Alex is struggling to cope with his m...

If you have a job as an English teacher, it’s a fairly safe bet that you enjoy reading. You probably read a lot when you were younger too. I remember reading lots of Stephen King books when I was about 13-14 and feeling very grown up, because I got something that adults read and enjoyed. You have also likely enjoyed the benefits of reading lots of books - the most obvious one being good literacy skills. Also, when analysing texts in the classroom, you can likely figure out authorial intent with ease, not stopping to think how you were able to do this - you just can! When teaching, I sometimes find stepping out of my own perspective to be very difficult. I have been criticised (rightly) by some of my colleagues for pitching things way too high in the resources that I make, and not considering the needs of students who perhaps struggle with English - students who might even despise reading. Psychologists refer to this as ‘the curse of expertise’ - if we are very good at something...