GCSEs are to stay!

[SPBInDisguise]

I didn't see that coming. Sorry if there's a thread already, I did look.

story here

You wouldn't need to read the whole of a Shakespeare play if you're doing it for Eng Lit Controlled Assessment, no.

You'd be watching at least one performance (with Macbeth I'd compare the Polanski & a fantastic modern dress version called 'Macbeth on the Estate'). Then you'd spend a couple of weeks analysing the language of a decent length extract in far more detail & at far greater depth than I spent on entire play scripts for O-Level.

Then you'd write an essay comparing this key scene with another text, usually a poem. You do need to show confident knowledge of the play as a complete text, but this doesn't mean reading every word.

We don't do Macbeth for GCSE, we do it in y8. Our GCSE Shakespeare text is R&J, comparing Act I scene 5 with 'To His Coy Mistress'. I can assure you that our most able candidates wring every nuance out of both...

What would they gain by sitting & reading it through, LaQueen?

Gosh I'm shocked the top sets aren't expected to read through the whole text.

At my DDs comp they certainly were expected to do so.

The link in the OP said:

There will be a new eight-subject measure of GCSEs, including English and maths, three subjects out of sciences, languages, history and geography and three other subjects, such as art, music or RE.

Eh? English and maths fine. But only three out of all sciences (according to last weeks news including computer science), hist, geog and lang? Surely a bright kid will be doing at least 4 out of those and then three 'other subjects'...fine to insist on an arty thing( art, music drama) and maybe a tech subject (which is where comp science should go) but the balance there sounds very odd. maybe the report is wrong. Not that it matters to pupils, its just league table metric.

Not a cohesive impression of the entire play, no. Because it'd take you at least a couple of weeks to read it round the class, glossing a substantial proportion of it as you go, which isn't actually what Shakespeare had in mind for appreciation of his work...

Bear in mind also that not every teenager is a confident & expressive sight reader of iambic pentameter with abundant archaic vocabulary. Not many adults are!

You can understand the play as a cohesive text far better by watching a performance in 'real time'. Although I usually start with a drama improv of the plotline & characters - after 20 minutes, with no prior exposure, my bottom set year 9 could confidently explain exactly what happens in Othello & why.

As for the language, the sort of thing we're looking for these days, is, to give a fairly example, a page long detailed exposition on the symbolism, alliteration, onomatopoeia & foreshadowing contained in the phrase 'so shows a snowy dove trooping with crows'.

Familiarity & understanding aren't at all the same thing, as your 'Wuthering Heights' example demonstrates. Why hadn't they drawn a family tree of characters or a storyboard of the plotline? It's not difficult to teach plot & character, but language analysis is a bit more demanding.

I'm not saying reading whole Shakespeare plays is a bad thing, you understand, given sufficient time. Just that we do have quite a lot to get through in 5 terms to cover two GCSEs, so we have to go in fast, teach some quite high level skills pretty quickly, & move on to applying them to the next text.

@Quicklook I'm not a teacher but DD1 has read her set books/plays many times. She does indeed know them inside out. She's had to do far more work on them then I had to do for English Lit O level (and I overkilled what I did then, too)

I'm probably being a bit thick .....

How can students simply not read the text ?

Surely questions could be on any aspect of the play.

What happens when an exam question is on a bit they've not read ?

'And, instead students were encouraged to access the play in other ways - other than actually bleddy reading it through FFS
How, how, how has that been allowed to happen???'

New Labour, New Labour, New Labour?

I have a problem with the idea that geography should pay quite so much attention to cities and rivers of the world. Obviously it's desirable to have a decent working knowledge of topography, but instead of learning that the Nile runs through much of Africa and that the Rhine runs through France, Germany and the Netherlands, would it not be far more useful to learn about flood plains, erosion and sedimentation, the impact of rivers on landscape and agriculture, irrigation systems, disaster management and the importance of rivers in trade? That's how we learned about rivers in geography in the 80s - across the boundaries of geology and social geography.

I also think Michael Gove's elimination of the EU from the curriculum is just spiteful and petty.

'a fantastic modern dress version called 'Macbeth on the Estate'

I'm not aware of this one. Is this down wid da kidz?

cumfy and claig the whole point of working with the play in the way raven suggests is that it is not necessary to memorise whole chunks. If a pupil sits through an uncut stage production of the play and does substantive work on the language, historical background etc. and then does an open book exam, you can ask the kind of questions that require real understanding of what Shakespeare is about. You can ask a candidate to look at a specific section of the play (which they may indeed not have read) and expect them to be able to use the skills and understanding gained in class to write a coherent and relevant essay-style answer about this piece of text. This demonstrates a far better grasp of the play than just regurgitating bits of it does.

As raven pointed out, the majority of adults today have not read a complete Shakespeare play - and they seem to manage perfectly well not having done so. As it happens I've read several Shakespeare plays in full since leaving school, but I am under no illusion that this makes me a better IT person, a better mother or a better citizen. I do however have the ability to understand various older forms of the English language, having learned this at school in Holland where we certainly did not read entire Shakespeare plays but used all the methods described by raven to very good effect.

I am so, so weary of this view that traditional = better.

Huh? Top set eng lit students aren't expected to read all of a Shakespeare play? I can understand not having time to read it through in class, but surely they could read it at home?

Not these days, claig. It's been around a while. It's v good though. Modern dress, language as wot Will wrote.

Oh claig. Low blow there, you are normally such an intelligent, reasoned poster.

Are you really saying that modern dress versions of Shakespeare set in modern times but dealing with the same thematic material have no value? I'd hate to live in a world where every performance of, say, King Lear was exactly the same. I've seen three different ones, two were modern. All were brilliant.

I'm talking about Shakespeare for CA, btw - our students do a different play each year, throughout KS3, so they do very much 'get it' by their GCSE course.

AQA do do an alternative route through GCSE Eng Lit using Shakespeare as an exam text, & then yes, you would need to read the whole thing (& omit something else in the exam - post 1914 prose I think, in which case you'd do that as CA, probably on an extract.)

I volunteered to examine it last year - bored with endlessly marking OM&M & Lord of the Flies! - but it's not popular, so AQA said no ta, they'd prefer me to stick to modern prose!

Fair point.
But do these modern versions use Shakespeare's language?

You can ask a candidate to look at a specific section of the play (which they may indeed not have read) and expect them to be able to use the skills and understanding gained in class to write a coherent and relevant essay

But surely a candidate who has read that section previously, has a significant advantage over one that hasn't ?

On the other hand what is the weighting of exams v continuous assessment in Eng Lit ?

'It's v good though. Modern dress, language as wot Will wrote.'

OK, that is good that they use the same language.

The weighting's 30% Shakespeare & the Literary Heritage CA (eg we do'Compare how the language of love & seduction are used in I,v of R&J & To His Coy Mistress' - 4 hour open book, exam conditions).

Then 35% Modern Prose (we do The Woman In Black - & yes, we read all of it!) & Other Cultures (just about everyone does Of Mice & Men, I can confidently say having marked 500 essays on Curley's Wife last June) .

& finally 35% poetry - one question on any two of fifteen poems, some modern, some pre-1914; & another question on an unseen poem.

cumfy that's true up to a point, but I really think that at 16 they should be able to make an informed decision to read the whole play at home - or not. And having said that, I am not at all sure that a single read-through of the whole play will make that much of a difference - the idea of an open book exam set against the background of this kind of teaching is to test the ability of a candidate to use what they have learned on material which is new to them - there are ways in which you can set the questions to make sure these are the skills which are tested. It makes marking more challenging, but that is a matter of implementing a system in which marking is done by qualified subject teachers, not by students doing piecework.

I think GCSE English is better than O level English in some ways. I don't remember doing poetry and I don't think we covered as much width, but may have had more depth. Can't remember exactly.