Gove kills the mockingbird with ban on US classic novels ...what do you think?

[mrz]

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article1414764.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2014_05_24

Some DCs will fall in love with 19th novels, but most will hate them. The haters will talk and mess about.

So that means that we shouldn't include 19th century novels on the syllabus?? What about the ones that will love them?

You already said your DS hates Of Mice and Men so it's not like the US offerings are a unanimous success either.

As for haters messing about and talking, that's a discipline issue not a curriculum one. I'm a maths teacher, do you think other subjects don't suffer from haters? Does that mean we shouldn't teach maths? Kids don't need to be overjoyed with every offering schools present to them, they are there to be educated, not entertained.

But 'Blood Brothers' - much though I like it, & have taught it - doesn't really hold a candle to 'Death of a Salesman', say.

I'm not convinced BBs is quite what the 'more C19th novelists & more Shakespeare sonnets!' lobby had in mind, either, but it'll probably end up being one of the loopholes some exam boards squeeze through to satisfy the letter if not the spirit of the new guidelines.

Equally, I'm in the process of marking 405 exam entries on 'An Inspector Calls' -as you say, it's 'OK'. Inspirational & engaging? Not so much.

It's not that there aren't great texts out there by British writers. There are.

It's a) the sheer pointlessness of excluding fantastic works, in English, for no good reason but that the writer, whilst writing in English, did not happen to hail from England. There's no justification for it, except

b) Michael Gove's ill-informed personal prejudices, which shouldn't be the basis of a curriculum.

The whole thing is simply as dim-witted as it is mean-spirited.

They're not on the 'must include' list, but they certainly aren't on an exclude list.

If you want to teach these fantastic works, there's nothing stopping you. And it's astonishing that with all those fantastic works out there, most schools opt for Of Mice and Men, which is not fantastic.

If English lit teachers are suddenly concerned about this wide range of great literature that is suddenly off the prescribed menu, why were they not teaching it before?

Are there any texts at the moment that aren't quite so 'western centric'? I know some are studied at A level - The God of Small Things for example, but is GCSE currently pretty much all English or American?

If you don't have a broad spectrum anyway, perhaps it is better to focus on British novels, and actually explore and be able to contrast the contexts better rather than jumping from, say, racism in the American south to witch hunts in Salem and McCarthyism to Victorian England. In that case the students have to learn a separate set of attitudes and society norms before they can really start to interpret and understand each book.

I can't decide

I'm not a huge fan of OM&M, personally, although it's an extremely useful set text in that it's engaging & can be taught meaningfully right across the ability range. There aren't all that many classic novels of which one can say as much.

I've been lobbying for a change to TKAM or LOTF - at least for higher sets - for years as it happens, but we have a departmental policy to all teach the same novel in case one of us falls under a bus.

However, what's stopping us from teaching novels that won't be examined is the fact that we have 200 minutes a week to teach two GCSEs; considerably less time than that allocated to, say, double award Science, & the same as is given to a single GCSE in Maths.

The Eng Lit specification is actually pretty crowded already, & tends to get further squashed by not being taught as a discrete subject from Eng Lang. There's no time to fit in an extra substantial work just for shits & giggles.

we'll make it work - the silver lining is that a lot of the stuff forced out of GCSE will simply find its way to the Y9 programme of study. But I honestly don't know a single English teacher who thinks that the KS4 programme will be anything but impoverished by this.

But Polkadots, it really isn't any easier to put, say, An Inspector Calls or Animal Farm into context than it is Of Mice & Men. Less so, IME.

The past is another country too.

The beauty of Animal Farm is that the parable is so vivid and engaging for DC who are probably still reading children's fiction for pleasure that the historical context and political satire just scream out for an explanation. IMVHO.

Does no-one read 1984 or Brave New World anymore at school?

Sorry if somebody has already explained this, but Why is there a list at all? Is the theory that exam boards can't be trusted?

blog.geoffbarton.co.uk/site/Blog/Entries/2014/5/25_Get_him%2C_Lennie.html

We did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at my comp. (Or maybe it was for AS, certainly wasn't A level). I loved it. Won't satisfy the pre 20C requisite though.

The only time I read 19C stuff (apart from one Hardy novel for A level) was in Uni and I hated, hated Austen and Dickens. I really had to force myself to read them and I am a big book lover. John Donne was great though.

I don't understand why 19C literature is considered more 'high brow' than 20C.

How he can think today's 14-16 year olds will ALL relate to pre-20th century English novels and Wordswoth, I have no idea. It will put them off reading for life

I find the idea that literature is there to be 'related to' and 'fallen in love with' really troublesome. If this stops first years at university coming out with 'relatable' every two minutes, some good will have come of it.
The 'how will this book make me a better person' approach has its flaws.

In one of the reports I read yesterday, it said that the govt will not be providing any extra money got schools to buy new texts. Tossers.

I'm probably in a minority here as haven't read the whole thread but I don't see anything wrong with removing Omam and Mockingbird from the syllabus. I have only taught for 6 years and am already bored to tears with Omam. It's a great book but why should it (and Mockingbird) be the only choices? My 36 yer old sister studied it at GCSE and we are still teaching it today.. Even though there are more choices for teachers OMAM or Mockingbird always seem to be the ones they go for because they have years of resources for them and there is so much online etc to help with planning. At my old school 1 out of 14 teachers taught Mockingbird purely because it was so much longer than OMAM and they were having to spend so much more time reading the book and therefore not so much revision time.

I would welcome getting to know a wider variety of texts. There are so many great books and many great books by British writers. There is nothing to stop students reading these books in their own time, in fact I studied Lord of the flies at GCSE and chose to read Mockingbird at the same time.

Great blog. It’s a reminder that underlying today’s bleak Sunday Times article on set-texts we have allowed politics in our country to drive education, and for the narrowness of assessment to determine what is taught.

I do find the ever increasing link between politics and education a bit worrying. Governments come and go. The lack of consistency in teaching in the past few years (everything constantly changing) is damaging to the children and to the teachers. I don't know how it works elsewhere, but I don't think things change so much all the time.

'Does no-one read 1984 and Brave New World at school anymore'

Yes but I expect confined to higher ability. One of mine did Brave New World '(and an Attwood) at A Level. One read the Orwell for fun after doing Animal Farm in year 8. Coursework is a good opportunity for free choice if the teacher chooses to take it.

Someone upthread claimed Huxley was second rate. Gosh he was prescient - my daughter was intrigued by the ideas that have actually come to pass.

When people complain about having the same old things each year - these books are new to the children.

That blog is nonsense. Teachers don't teach Of Mice and Men because that's what they decide is good for the class in front of them, they teach it because it's a set text. They haven't got any more or less freedom to choose what to teach under the new categories than the old ones.

If it was the other way around they'd probably moan that they were losing the opportunity to teach favourites like Huck Finn or Great Expectations (or whatever the exam boards put as options for 19th century text), instead of going 'brilliant, I love George and Lennie, they are just so inspiring!'

Slipshodsybil - I loved Brave New World and 1984. We read them in Year 10, IIRC, along with Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies (which I hated), The Crucible, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye. The only one I have re-read in middle age is Brave New World - as you say, so prescient, and when you get older and wiser you are even more stunned by the prescience.

Modern prose or drama
AQA Anthology
Sunlight on the Grass

Set Texts:

William Golding
Lord of the Flies

Kevin Brooks
Martyn Pig

Susan Hill
The Woman in Black

Joe Simpson
Touching the Void

Dylan Thomas
Under Milk Wood

Arthur Miller
The Crucible

Diane Samuels
Kindertransport

J.B. Priestley
An Inspector Calls

Dennis Kelly
DNA

Exploring cultures

John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Purple Hibiscus
2
Lloyd Jones
Mister Pip

Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird

Doris Pilkington
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence

Shakespeare
Macbeth

Much Ado about Nothing

Romeo and Juliet

Twelfth Night

Julius Caesar

Prose from the English Literary Heritage

Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice

Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights

Charles Dickens
Great Expectations

Thomas Hardy
The Withered Arm and
other Wessex Tales

George Orwell
Animal Farm

Noble, Geoff Bartons blog isn't rubbish! Of Mice and Men is perfect for younger years and lower ability. His language is lovely. A perennial task for reluctant writers in my class was to choose a title - 'the dream' - 'the disappointment of Curley's wife' - 'Candy's Dog' and to write a free verse poem using only phrases lifted straight from the book. The repetition of motifs that run through the book and phrases meant the poems were never less than beautiful even if the students lacked creativity. It made them look closely at the words and themes and make sense of their character's story. If accompanied by a commentary explaining how they chose the phrases and created the poem and the effect they hoped to achieve etc, it made a really successful coursework piece and helped the less able do well and experience the words and universal human feelings.

Bonsoir all those are still great to do. Gatsby is another I like better in middle age. I needed to be older to appreciate the depth of the disappointment and emptiness.

Raven maths GCSE now counts as two GCSEs in the league tables to acknowledge the fact that it actually covers far more content than other GCSEs. I do understand that with a bottom set you could probably only cover the bare bones of the syllabus, but with a top set, is there really no room for sneaking a few extra books in there? Get them to read over a holiday then discuss in class? Aren't you trying to prepare them for A-level?

Mrz, that list looks ok to me?

slipshod if OMAM is perfect for lower years, then that's great, because it can still be taught to lower years as it hasn't been banned. Ok, so it might not be a set GCSE text, but I'm sure that English Lit teachers will be able to find some offering on the new exam board syllabus to teach.

Just because it's an easy book to teach, it doesn't mean that it should automatically be included on an exam syllabus. I'm sure a skilled English teacher would be able to come up with a good task for another book. Exam boards won't be only be putting unteachable books on the syllabus, it's not in their interests.

Gatsby is a great read. I had a Scott Fitzgerald moment sometime in my youth and re-read it then but, as you say, it probably deserves another look in from a later vantage point!