To think an English teacher should know the correct pronunciation of Glamis?

[susannahmoodie]

As in Thane of......?

Or is it now ok to say "glam-mis"??

He did.

Though I still feel he missed a tremendous opportunity for apt Anglo-Saxonism by leaving 'windfucker' out of his list of synonyms for kestrel in 'the windhover'.

Hahaha! Oh, if only...

Oddly enough, that poem was involved in my own personal "ohisthathowyousayit" - after declaiming "I caught this morning morning's minion" etc rather a lot as an undergrad it wasn't til I was in Exeter and they opened a new Wetherspoons called The Chevalier that I realized I should have been pronouncing it "O my shevaleer!", not "O, my shivalliay!"

Huh. Yes, I can see that. I've never read that poem out loud (it is difficult).

Which reminds me, I think the teacher might also have been doing that thing where you know how something should be said, but somehow when you say it aloud it insists on coming out wrongly?

Oh yes, that could be it, certainly -- is there a name for that?

"There's many a slip/ Twixt graphological representation of phoneme in a system which ties semantic content to aural effect, and lip" nods sagely

or what about Stivichall in Coventry pronounced 'Stychall'!

On 16th Century pronunciation, everyone on the thread should watch this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCckcTHWqKw

I think Shakespeare may sounded very different to what we might think.

I think I'd be more concerned whether the teacher has a good relationship with your DC? Does he/she monitor the child's progress? Is work marked frequently and useful feedback given? Does DC enjoy learning with this teacher?

Compared to these issues, the pronunciation of a single word in a play (which may be on the GCSE syllabus, but this in no way means all schools/teachers opt to teach it) is trivial. Yep, revel in your superior knowledge on here, but I wouldn't bring it up with the teacher unless you want to come across as the sort of parent who's more interested in teacher bashing than ensuring your DC is happy and making effective progress.

Last time I checked, knowing the correct pronunciation of a place name was not in any GCSE or A'Level spec. For this reason, to me, your post says far more about you than the teacher in question.

I hate to upset all the educated masses from Edinburgh University etc but actually your DCs' teacher is a teacher of English, many English teachers teach other subjects!
I am a teacher of English and my main memory of seeing Macbeth on stage is a naked Sean Bean...it was good!

I love that clara! That came up on my FB the other day. It's awesome.

I wouldn't expect everyone to know how to pronounce the word.

I wouldn't expect every English grad to know how to pronounce the word because they might not have studied that particular play.

I would expect every teacher, English grad or not, who knows they're going to be teaching Macbeth, to have watched the play in at least two versions, read around it and studied it a bit, before teaching it, even if it never came up on their undergraduate degree. You do get advance warning of which texts you're going to be teaching. The pronunciation will be clear from watching any performances of the play. It is not a minor word in that play, either.

Same with teaching As You Like It and knowing that Jacques is pronounced Jay-kwees in that play. Not something everyone would know, but the teacher should.

For me it would be a flag that would make me wonder how much the teacher had studied the text they are now teaching. Learning about a text alongside your pupils can be OK sometimes if you have other teaching skills, but for really able students it is necessary for the teacher to genuinely know more about the subject than their class does, and really able students need teaching too.

I had a Secondary teacher who taught us to pronounce:
'Jacques' as 'Jay-queeeez'.

We studied As You Like It.

A pupil with a connection with France told him it was 'Jacques' but, no, he insisted, 'Jay-queeeez' it was. When we met up with some other High School kids to go and see the play and spoke of Jay-queez they pissed themselves laughing. Thanks, Mr Lambert!

But, we did say: 'Glarms' (wrongly? according to trudging?)

x posts, scifiscam

NO - don't believe it? Don't tell me old MrLambertwhocantfinishasentenceashewatchesthetrainsgopastheclassroom was right about Jay-queez?

But ... why would a French pronunciation be right given Shakespeare was from, erm, the Midlands?

His French is sometimes deliberately shit ('Leroy, a Cornish name').

Isn't it quite possible people in his company didn't all talk with the same accents or sound the same?

I am a teacher of English and my main memory of seeing Macbeth on stage is a naked Sean Bean...it was good!

Lucky you. My abiding memory of seeing King Lear on stage is seeing (from a seat at the front of the stalls) a 70-something Ian McKellen naked. It was a bit uncomfortable, tbh (though I imagine that was the point) .

ClearBlueWater, your teacher was right, the other kids were arrogant and wrong - this is a Shakespeare play, not a modern story about someone called Jacques.

"Jakes" is also correct in some lines where the characters are taking the piss out of him by intentionally abbreviating the pronunciation of his name to sound like a toilet; elsewhere it's Jay-kwees. Never Jacques.

I had a cookery teacher who one lesson taught us to make croissants.
Pronounced croy-sunts. When I corrected her precocious twat I got told off!
Ok so she wasn't a French teacher but come on!

what a strange thread

/exits pursued by a beer

Picks self off floor.

Bloody hell, who knew?

I STILL think he was correct by default, mind, he didn't have a grasp of the basics of any of our set texts (the 'Wife of Bath' was especially grim, not only pronunciation wise but general gist wise!) and he was a really awful teacher, but, hey, right be default is still right!

re the 'Midlands accent' - it's a pretty moveable feast now, yet alone 500 years ago, so I think it's unlikely anyone has definitive proof of how Shakespeare's average cast member pronounced his lines, is it not?

Yes, that is what I was getting at ...

exits pursued by a beer

Best typo (intentional or otherwise) ever

Yes, Jeanne , me too

ie neither of us can KNOW definitively that he pronounced it Jacques
(ie modern French pronunciation) or Jay-queez...

given that he had 'fun' with language, ie Leroy for a 'Cornish' name then I don't suppose the Great Man himself would be overly huffy which way we said it?

Need to track down English teacher though and tell him he wasn't definitely wrong, the way we arrogantly thought!

This thread is full of twats especially the person who put English teachers in inverted commas.

I had a history teacher who was an NQT teaching me A Level - she covered the Fascism modules. She pronounced "Falange" as it is written - Fal-ange. She had excellent results and a few of us went on to get history degrees from Russell Group universities.

Stone the bitch.

Iguanatail oh how i chortled at your comment

OK full of twats is an exaggeration. Some twats is more accurate.

Those going on about how it's possible to have ad free in English and not have read Macbeth- agreed.

However this teacher is teaching the play and appears not to have ever seen it performed nor (as achickencalledkorma says) to have noticed that the 2 syllable pronounciation can't possibly fit the metre, when learning about the store is probably the most fundamental part of studying Shakespeare?

YANBU OP. however I'm curious how you know about this- did you and she actually have a conversation in which the word "Glamis" was used? Or do you and your DD or DS chat about Glamis/ Macbeth so much that your DD/DH know how to pronounce it and ratted the teacher out?