GCSEs are to stay!

[SPBInDisguise]

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

story here

[pointythings]

That's my claig!


I think teaching poetry is essential. Not learning it off by heart, but teaching children to think about what they're reading, processing it intellectually and emotionally as well.

[ravenAK]

The reason for not reading the whole thing would definitely not be because the language was too complicated! & our kids are indeed constantly exposed to it. My low ability year 9s are currently transfixed by Othello...

I think I may be an old gimmer also. My grammar school would ask us to read entire Shakespeare plays as homework too. I'm not sure it aided our comprehension, & I'm quite sure it sucked an awful lot of the joy out of it.

Plenty of people are indeed able to do all of the above. I'm inclined to question the value of the reading every word & memorising big chunks, though, & it's definitely possible to analyse in depth without it. As pointythings explained, it's about developing a skill set which can then be usefully applied elsewhere.

Mind you, my year 11s are amusingly gobsmacked at my ability to recite vast swathes of all our set texts by rote - they've accused me of having a concealed autocue! . But their understanding is definitely far better than mine was when I got my grade A O-Level...

[Abra1d]

'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!.'

So we have to reduce study to the ability level of the less intelligent?

[claig]

'Back in my day, there were people who could do both and that was what got them an A.'

I think Gove was certainly capable of doing both and then some! I don't have the same feeling about the New Labour elite! I am not sure if they were capable of either!

Gove seems to want to restore rogour and end New Labour dumbing down.

[RussiansOnTheSpree]

@pointy I guess Claig would disapprove of the David Tennant Much Ado and Hamlets, then. :( Also the Ian McKellan Coriolanus. I have no idea whether Othello at the NT this summer will be modern dress or period. But I doubt it will matter. I'm fairly sure my kids will get a better experience of shakespeare by seeing this than by reading Othello (although they will read it, too - two of them already have).

[RussiansOnTheSpree]

We did lots of poetry when I did O level English lit. Ballads. The Rime of the ancient mariner, Peter Grimes, Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Linn, and....some others I can't remember. NOT the ballad of reading goal which was a big shame. there was one called Edmund Edmund which was vicious. The poetry section was brilliant, to be honest. And I think we worked hard but not any harder than the top kids today.

[RussiansOnTheSpree]

Gove is a Gradgrind. He shows no appreciation of the arts (including drama) at all. I seriously doubt whether he got an A for his O level English lit.

I'm in a good position to compare since DD1 is doing her GCSEs this summer and is an A* student in English. She has to do more than I did. Both in quantity terms of assessed work (whether by exam or controlled assessment) and in qualitative terms regarding the skills required. I think in raw knowledge terms, the amount of memorising is about the same.

[RussiansOnTheSpree]

Making the English syllabus accessible to students of all abilities (and talented dedicated teachers finding innovative ways of teaching so that disengaged kids have a change of engaging) is not the same as dumbing it down. Clearly some people have serious problems with either the understanding or use of English.

[ShipwreckedAndComatose]

You had the same selecton as I did Russian!

I didn't enjoy it so much! however, I did love the twentieth century short stories and also To kill a mockingbird. I hated Henry the forth part one though.

I agree, I think students work just as hard today. I also think it is really very hard and unfair to try to make comparisons based on very little understanding of what is actually involved with the courses.

Gove may be capable of doing both but that doesn't stop him being an utter ass when it comes to Education.

[claig]

'Gove is a Gradgrind. He shows no appreciation of the arts (including drama) at all. I seriously doubt whether he got an A for his O level English lit.'

I am not sure what he got for English, but I have no doubt that he got an A for Latin. The man speaks Latin as if it was his mother tongue and I wouldn't be surpised if he expects the same of today's yoof.

[claig]

'Clearly some people have serious problems with either the understanding or use of English.'

But why should everybody suffer for New Labour's deficiencies?

[RussiansOnTheSpree]

I rest my case.

[RussiansOnTheSpree]

Or, as a wise man once said 'Ipsa that'.

[pointythings]

Spoke too soon, claig the Gove-worshipper is back.

Can't you see that Gove is trying to recreate what worked for him (and not for the majority of children who, back then, could go to unskilled but valuable factory jobs which no longer exist today)?

It is not acceptable to return to an education system which only serves a minority. I'd have a little more sympathy for Gove if he were putting forward proposals to create a vocational education system which would foster a generation of skilled engineers, electricians, builders, carpenters, and which would properly value those skills instead of brushing them aside as 'not academic'. But he isn't doing that - and that tells me that he simply does not care about high quality education for everyone.

A substantial number of business leaders contacted Gove about their concerns that narrowing the curriculum in this way would not give them the young people they needed in the workplace - and these people are natural Conservative allies.
Learning has moved on. There is no one size fits all solution, there are many different ways to learn effectively, not just one. Gove refuses to see this.

There is definitely a case to be made for improving GCSEs, and I don't see any teachers on here saying that everything in state education is perfect. However, throwing out the entire system, refusing to pilot it - that speaks of an immense arrogance that I don't care for. Michael Gove doesn't care about education, he cares about political advancement - succeeding David Cameron, being Prime Minister. He is not to be trusted.

As for speaking fluent Latin - nice party trick, useful if you want to read Catullus in the original, but not particularly useful in the world of work. It also does not signify an innate brilliance, just a facility for languages. Some people have it, others don't - doesn't make one type of person more worthy, or intellectually advanced, than another.

[claig]

'Or, as a wise man once said 'Ipsa that'.'

I bet that man was Gove!

[RussiansOnTheSpree]

It would appear that Gove is not alone in lacking a cultural hinterland.

[claig]

I am glad that GCSEs are here to stay.

I think Gove may have been guilty of acting like a bull in a china shop.

There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Throwing New Labour out was enough!

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, fixing a few spokes is enough.

[ravenAK]

Abra1d "'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!.'

So we have to reduce study to the ability level of the less intelligent?"

No, not at all - you're conflating performing ability with comprehension. My 8 year old ds did a fantastic barnstorm through 'Now is the winter of our discontent...' earlier this week. He's a Plantagenet geek, currently obsessed with the discovery of Richard III, & I gave him the speech to have a crack at because I thought it would be fun.

Does he understand all the ideas in it? Nope. He's 8.

Equally, I have GCSE students who could analyse that speech, cold, & produce an A* response, but who'd shrivel like a slug in dry ice if I asked them to perform it in front of the class. Different skills.

I'm also irritated by this from LaQueen: 'Hey, let's make this so that just about every child, regardless of ability, can access Shakespeare, even if it's in a really basic, Bard-By-Numbers fashion - we'll get rid of the dreary stuff that can be hard to get your head around, and we'll replace it with diulted, more sparkly ways of studying it. Let's go'

Well,'irritated' isn't fair tbh - if more people actually took an interest in, & questioned, the teaching of Eng Lit, my colleagues & I would absolutely welcome it on the whole, especially if they took the trouble to inform themselves as to what we actually do!

MAKE us justify what we do. DON'T let us get away with laziness or complacency. The texts we're studying deserve better than that.

But the thinking behind it is quite wrong. Yes, Shakespeare belongs to all of us. Yes, we should all be able to access his work. He certainly wasn't the exclusive province of 'high ability' individuals in his lifetime.

But really, if all you want is 'basic, Bard-By-Numbers' - by all means set your students the task of reading the whole text, without focus or rationale. Let's not forget that we old gimmers were taking home dusty copies of Macbeth because those texts were not then in the public domain online.

I think it was probably an acknowledgment of the problem I mentioned above - reading an entire play around the class is an awful way to introduce it. You cast it, & immediately half the class are doing nothing, actually, that lesson. Several of your keen readers are actually pretty rubbish. You stop every ten minutes to explain what's going on (let's not count all the times you stop to prompt a reader who's lost his/her place or just lost interest).

You stagger to the end two weeks later. Everyone is utterly appalled to discover that no, that's not the misery over - now they have an essay to do! Everyone now officially hates Shakespeare. Shakespeare's contemporary adoring public would've bloody hated him if that's how they'd encountered Henry V or Macbeth.

So let's not do that. (& yes, I do know it wasn't always quite that ghastly in the hands of a teacher who was able to communicate a passion for Mr Shakespeare).

OK, let's get them to read it individually at home!

Hmmm. Why? The kids will want to know why. & I've yet to see a convincing argument, on this thread or in quite a lot of years teaching & examining GCSE Eng Lit. I've just had to introduce myself to Othello, which I'd never previously read in its entirety. Did I begin by sitting down with my trusty Complete Works? Did I chuff. I watched Lawrence Fishburne & Kenneth Branagh, then I watched Orson Wells. (& then I read the play in its entirety - but I'm teaching it, not studying it for a Controlled Assessment).

Please understand that I don't not set 'go away & read Romeo & Juliet' because of low expectations of my students. Or because it's difficult for me to do so - most of my current B-A* year 10 group would dutifully go away & read it. & I'd have no marking to do that week! Result!

I don't set it, because they'll get a lot more out of 'Right, that 300 word mini essay you wrote me last week on "so shows a snowy dove trooping with crows". THIS week I want you to find another quotation which links to the main idea from your essay - might be light/dark, or bird imagery, or peace/conflict, or iambic pentameter, or alliteration or onomatopoeia - & write another 300 words exploring similarities & differences between how Shakespeare used imagery &/or language in the two quotations. Oh, & there'll be a house point for anyone who adds a paragraph comparing the same idea in a DIFFERENT Shakespeare play.'

The way we teach Shakespeare in 2013 is a lot more work for both students & teacher than the way I studied Shakespeare at school in 1983. It's also a damn sight more enjoyable, rewarding & rigorous.

[BoffinMum]

Let me nail my theses to the door.

1. The research G and his ilk cite as evidence is often free articles they find on Google. They can't access the up to date state of the art research, or they don't know how. Or they don't care enough about what they are doing to bother. Most of them are journalists so more used to a soundbyte culture than a scholarly one.
2. These articles they cite are often higher education related, written by specialists in other subjects. For example they cited a paper written by a Biology professor in the US discussing how he gets 200+ university students at a time in a lecture based system to develop a proper understanding of the material he tries to cover. Obviously this has extremely limited relevance to children, schools, the UK, or anyone not studying Biology at university level in a lecture based system.
3. They are also limited in their reading of books. They cherry pick sections of books, for example in one case by the philosopher Gramsci, and then cite as evidence pages that they think accord with their position. This often misses the author's main arguments entirely. However their own lack of a higher degree in most cases means they are unable to read these texts sufficiently intelligently. In shirt, they don't know what they don't know. They dabble with learning - they are dilettantes.
4. Their main motivations are twofold:

Crush what they call 'The Blob' which is their term for a alleged massed leftist opposition that is the education 'establishment'. To give an idea of how ideologically warped that concept is, they are including me in that - a public school educated ex teacher with experience of both sectors, who teaches and lectures along very traditional lines, and always has. I am, apparently, part of their 'blob'.
Second motivation is to privatise education in a particular way. Now normally when Tories privatise things they extend the courtesy to those working for and using the business, in the form of shares. Not in this case. School profit bases are effectively given away to Tory cheerleaders, and those at the chalk face, such as pupils, teachers and parents, are ridden roughshod over.

1. They get away with this by invoking a rhetoric of educational decline which isn't truthful. The reality is that our school system was underfunded for decades, but once more money was spent, we moved a lot closer to a high reliability education system that offered opportunities to a greater number of children. This is now stalling.
2. It's a game of chess. Gove moves the pieces on the board - exams, curriculum, performance related pay and so on, and people are busy reacting to that, not realising checkmate is looming. Checkmate is back door privatisation.
3. It's the same with the NHS. That's why you are seeing so many stories of uncaring nurses at the moment.
4. There is a religious element to this. Gove has siphoned money off to certain Jewish schools, and his wing man DS wants it siphoned off to certain RC schools. None of this is particularly democratic.

To be continued.

[merrymouse]

"I watched Lawrence Fishburne & Kenneth Branagh, then I watched Orson Wells. (& then I read the play in its entirety)".

I'm just assuming that they would want to do what you did because these students have chosen to study English Literature. It's not as though anybody has to take this GCSE? (Or do they?).

Having said that I'm probably viewing this through rose tinted spectacles. I know people who got 'A's at A-level back in the 80's and claim not to have read all the way through at least one of the set texts.