expected to know about prostitution in a GCSE exam?

[allinahuddle]

Just wondered if I am a prude or if this is inappropriate? Dd2 sat her English literature exam yesterday and the poetry section as expected had two poems to compare and contrast. The introduction to them said they were both about nature and how it affects the man made world. One poem was about prostitution and the other about mining. She said she found it confusing as the introduction made her think her instincts were wrong. She thought it was about drugs and maybe sex but didn't dare write it as she felt sure it wouldn't be that on an exam paper. I can see how perhaps prostitution could be studied as part of a social question in another subject I suppose but to include it as an unseen poetry question for 15 and 16 year olds seems inappropriate to me. To assume that this age group would feel confident to talk about this in an exam situation seems mad. It aldo seems to put the more anxious and less confident or less streetwise kids at a disadvantage as they felt embarrassed writing about it, especially after being told both poems were about nature. Only a couple of kids in the whole school actually wrote about prostitution or drugs even those on target for an A or an A*. AIBU?

Agree, marianne.

But, I do think it goes both ways. You can't champion nuanced interpretation and then claim that every child in the class has to agree with you on that interpretation, I don't think. It's one of the pitfalls - if you accept text is ambiguous, sometimes you're going to get people who stubbornly refuse to accept your reading.

Er squiz, I'm marking that paper. I get paid the same however long it takes me per paper (within the deadline) and I am actively encouraged to reward any reasonable interpretation as long as it is backed up and well argued. I have absolutely not been given anything like a 'right answer' to look for. So you don't have to wring your hands over that one

I heart - what about omissions - 'a reasonable interpretation' that ignored allusions to prostitution? Would it still be reasonable? I don't think the poem is that ambiguous. And surely comprehension is a skill?

would someone who teaches English or poetry have a bash at answering the question, out of interest?
Would love to see this poem analysed.

Thyme it is in my guidelines to mark positively, ie mark what's there, don't look for what isn't there. I think that's reasonable, otherwise you'd get examiners penalising hundreds of students for not including things they themselves would have included, and we wouldn't be able to achieve consistency.

This is GCSE, not A Level. We're looking for skills, including comprehension. But it's an unseen text. As several PP have pointed out, you can't possibly expect them to include every possible point. If the points they HAVE included are top band quality, I'll give them a top band grade and happily pull the hair of anyone who says I shouldn't

Ok. I don't think this is the central meaning, but I'll give it a go to see if I can avoid the prostitution and make a decent reading.

The poem draws on the imagery of nature and the cityscape, constructing a meditation on the nature of love that is fractured, like the pavements of the city, with unexpectedly beautiful images of flowering lilac.

The poem is set in the liminal spaces of the city - the 'alleys' and 'spaces between', and the 'roundabouts' that are on the way to somewhere else. In these spaces, human experience is physically and emotionally cold, characterised by girls 'shiver[ing] in April winds' and men and women making 'deals' and 'transactions'. The first of these lines evokes Eliot's 'Wasteland', which also makes reference to the emotional emptiness of modern urban space, and which also claims that April, the 'cruelest month' is 'breeding lilacs out of the dead land'.

However, this imagery of coldness and ugly desolation - 'sour earth' and gardens flourishing with litter instead of plants - is in startling contrast with the central image of the poem, the new mother with her baby, who, like the flowering lilac, proves that 'love ... will open for everyone'. Although the scene seems desolate and bleak, the mother's love simply exists, 'before love knows that it is love'. It is innocent, unlike the capitalist city with which it is juxtaposed.

I could go on, but my computer is running out of charge!

Oh, and I think if I had time I'd talk about the way the lilac blooming - 'pushing' its blossom out - is like an image of a woman in labour.

I think there's quite a lot of maternal imagery going on, and the way those two lines break across the syntax is reminiscent of someone panting through labour, too.

The poem is set in the liminal spaces of the city...Wasteland

Perhaps someone who marks or teaches GCSE could hazard a guess at the proportion of candidates who will use the word "liminal" correctly and talk about intertextuality with The Wasteland? I'm guessing "not many".

Yeah, but that was Jeanne's reply :) It would be a bit strange to try & pretend to be a GCSE student.

I honestly don't think it's a poem "about prostitution" as all those students anxiously fear! There's much more to it than that, it's a side-issue unless you had enough time to explore every single possible nuance. Which, of course, you don't in an exam and aren't expected to with an unseen.

I can't make myself be a teenager any more, but I think - judging from the question - I'd want to talk about the relationship between nature as symbolised by the lilacs, and human nature. Both are disorderly, promiscuous, unplanned pushing through everywhere and anywhere. I think it's sentimental to privilege the mother and her baby. The point is that fundamentally there is no 'distinction' between the various different manifestations of desire. They simply happen.

Namechange ask me in 3 weeks. My money's on 0%

name, I wasn't pretending to be a GCSE student! I was being as pretentious as I could manage.

It occurred to me earlier in this thread, however, that a student (especially one who'd been reading the news about the Indian women in Nepal) could interpret it as being about surrogacy. That'd cover the new mother and the transactions of flesh and cash.

I don't think that is what the idea is, but it'd be tenable.

marianne - mmm, not sure 'sentimental' is the right word, though? I don't think it is a particularly simple or 'cute' image of motherhood, is it? Yes, in a way it's lovely with the image of the new morning and the new baby, but it's very much about the baby coming into a world that doesn't expect it, the same way the lilac is flourishing in a back alley.

I had a chuckle over "liminal" as well. Great word, but I would happily stake my life that neither my DD nor any of her friends would know it.

I feel very reassured by Iheart's comments about not penalising students for the stuff they didn't know. My feeling about the poem was the prostitution and drugs references would be fairly clear to an adult but too subtle for the average 16-year-old. It's all about context, and the poems were introduced with a statement saying that they were about nature encroaching on the human world. So their attention was deliberately focused on that idea.

By the way, has anybody seen a copy of "Huw's Farm"? I can't find it anywhere on the web.

I was being as pretentious as I could manage.

"Everytime I see the word lilies I reach for The Wasteland".

hack, I'm 30 and I only learnt to spell it in the last couple of years.

I don't think I know enough about GCSE students to know how they'd answer, but as I read her, grey was asking people who teach English? Which I do, though not GCSE.

To his coy mistress shocked me when I was younger.

Just thought I'd throw that one in there.

My DD (who had her poetry paper this morning) said that one of her friends who was doing a different set of poems had said one of hers was 'a bit iffy', so DD made her read Coy Mistress which was in her 'relationships' theme.

Errol that's the paper my ds did this morning.

Some poems in that collection have some fairly pointed references to going down to sexy town as ds put it , others downright creepy (Farmer's Bride, is it?).

But if I was an English teacher, that's exactly the set of poems I would choose for my class to study. 16 year olds tend to understand and remember the finer details of poetry analysis far better if it refers to sex than most other topics.

Namechange0dq8
Perhaps someone who marks or teaches GCSE could hazard a guess at the proportion of candidates who will use the word "liminal" correctly and talk about intertextuality with The Wasteland? I'm guessing "not many".

Does it matter? The learning from this thread is that individual, creative responses to unseen poetry are fine, so long as the interpretation is plausible and can be supported.

It doesn't actually matter that she didn't write about prostitution. She'll be marked on her own interpretation and how well she's able to support that with quotes from the poem, so nothing to worry about

We haven't mentioned Chaucer yet...

But isn't the OPs point that her daughters interpretation was that the main theme was prostitution? So she was left floundering trying to make herself see it another way. It's all well and good for us to now read the poem and interpret it as a sub-theme. It isn't my interpretation of the poem but if I read an interview with the author and she declared it was all about prostitution I wouldn't be surprised.

I don't think the OP is unreasonable to think her daughter isn't the only 16 year old who would baulk at writing confidently about prostitution as the main theme. At sixteen I would have been embarrassingly confident to talk about death, romantic love, war, politics etc but sex was still embarrassing. Yes easy to mention briefly, buried in your answer, but if you don't think it's the main topic very difficult.

The word liminal is taught as part of the Woman in Black, a large part of which takes place in a liminal setting and involves cash and babies!

The Woman in Black is a set text at GCSE.

Just like An Inspector Calls mentions prostitution and is a set text at GCSE.

Surely the point is that there are multiple ways to interpret the poem, and part of that interpretation is going to reflect what the student knows based on their two year study of different texts.