The Forty-fifth Republic - Is there anyone there? Surely time for half term

[Staffdontblowitnow]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement. Baiters, haters, goaders, and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

You can play here if you are a member of one the following groups-

-ABBA - anti bashers and baiting association
-SWAB - school workers against bashers
-SWOT - school workers opposing teacherbashers
-STARS - schoolworkers together against ranting + slurs

Do not give the staffroom password just in case it attracts the wrong sort

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the booze is stashed - Thirsty Tuesdays, Fizz Fridays now in operation.

If you come with a stick to goad us then that is not allowed in the staffroom and you will receive a detention

I also don't know who Diana Wynne Jones is!

I did read all the Susan Coopers. I am actually quite glad there was no HP. Susan Cooper is much better.

All of these books apart from David Eddings which I haven’t read. Should I? I love fantasy. Golden Pavements was my favourite Blue Door book, Charlotte Sometimes was my favourite time slip book and Diana Wynne Jones is one of my top ten favourite authors. Fire and Hemlock was the one I loved the most because of the fairy tale element but anything with Chrestomanci too.

A lot of us are definitely of the same vintage. I noticed that with the Latin and RoA discussion.

Not primary, name but that makes sense to me.
You keep saying you're no good at coming up with ideas.... (this might sound rude... sorry if so) but what ideas are you expecting to come up with??? It's all been done before, so you're really unlikely to invent a thing... and you're not expected to.
Cut yourself some slack!

@Piggywaspushed

I also don't know who Diana Wynne Jones is!

Chrestomanci > Harry Potter.
Howl’s Moving Castle is incredible.

She was so prolific and imaginative.

Here’s Diana Wynne Jones talking about being taught by CS Lewis and Tolkien:

When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying ‘It’s his Christianity, you know,’ as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…

“I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.”

Who was asking about english starters? I've got some possibly not legitimately scanned stuff I can email if you pm me.

You are a bad influence, noble. I’ve tracked down a copy of Reflections and ordered it.

Charlotte Sometimes!!! YYY. Rare to find someone who knows that.

And Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, anything sci fi from Dr Who to John Wyndham.

There is some really quite horrid stuff labelled YA. My boss and I (both in post only a few years) are constantly finding stuff on our shelves and declaring "I think we need to make that Senior Fiction!" (Y9 +)

We're all toying with making a Sixth Form only section for the really horrid stuff....

• horrid or explicit, I meant.

That was me as well @mrshamlet
Shame I'm not great at English, given how it's so important and all!
But thank you for the feedback. Just need to get it written up now and record a couple of lessons then I've finished until tomorrow

The Ogre Downstairs is the best book ever. It was the only Jackanory book that I would not miss a single episode of, as a child. I've read it to so many classes and they always love it. I also enjoyed ballet shoes, all the Sadler's Wells books, E Nesbit, Enid Blyton's 5 Findouters and Faraway Tree and all the Chalet School books. Also loved Little House on the Prairie books although when I tried to read these to my own kids they were quite hard going. Moved onto Flowers in the Attic as a teenager.

@namechangedyetagain do not make me come over there and shake you!!!
I couldn't do what you do, even for £115k. You're attempting what seems impossible to me - to give kids a good grounding in everything. By the time they get to me in y10, I'm just polishing. And I've been a polisher for 22 years, so I'm pretty good at it now.
Don't expect to know everything yet... your mentors need to earn their keep!
If you pm me an email address I'll send it over :)

While you guys were all reading I was probably practising the piano. The only books I remember reading were the adventure books by Ian Livingstone like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Enid Blyton was banned at my primary so have never read any. Not a big reader here.

Do you still play @Monkeytennis97 ?

My 6th Form English teacher attended JRR Tolkien's lectures. He said Tolkien often seemed distracted - 'And, of course, we all know why now.'
Which is an anecdote that makes me smile.

And a lecturer I had later in life was Dianne Wynn Jones' sister.

Fire and Hemlock was the one I loved the most because of the fairy tale element

Bustopher have you read DWJ’s essay about how she wrote it? The female hero, the Odyssey? The fairytales and influences?

“All the female characters are arranged in threes, with Polly always at the centre. There are Nina (who is silly), Polly (who is learning the whole time), and Fiona (who is sensible); there are Granny, Polly, and Ivy, old, young, and middle-aged respectively. The first threesome may not strike people as significant, but taken along with the second, I hope it begins to suggest the Three-Formed Goddess, diva triforma. Towards the end of the book, Granny takes on the role of Fate and Wisdom quite overtly, shearing fish and explaining the riddle of the ballad of Tam Lin. Laurel is of course an aspect of this Goddess. Consequently, the most important threesome is Laurel, Polly, Ivy. Ivy is the mundane parasitical version of Laurel, evergreen and clinging — Laurel as the Lorelei in Suburbia, if you like. And Polly — make no mistake — is intended to be an aspect of Laurel too — Laurel as Venus and the Fairy Queen”

And she is often disregarded as a mere children’s fantasy author!

The essay is in Reflections but someone has painstakingly typed it up here (you can tell by the typos!)

petson.livejournal.com/200935.html

I looked up DWJ and suspect she came along too late for me. I don't like sci fi fantasy type stuff much either so she wouldn't have been my bag I'm afraid. I have heard of Howl's Moving Castle but only vaguely because of film and MN.

My early teenage years can be summed up by this picture:

Try again

I still have all of the Chalet School books on my shelf, and every Agatha Christie - not quite sure what that says about me! I used to re read everything too, especially library books. I love a book series to this day so I have loads of series on my shelves - No1 ladies detective agency, Caedfal, Agatha Raisin, Morse, Rebus, Maigret (can you tell I’d also be excellent at murdering people if needed?)

And now I'm looking at some of the covers, I can remember all the details of the stories and most of the character's names. Surely there is room in my head for something more relevant?

In this one, Phoebe loves Brad - she's been with him for ages. They are the two in the middle. Then she gets into drama stuff, and meets the guy who is standing behind her - I think his name is Griffin. The other girl is called Brenda and is not one of the cool kids like Brad and Phoebe, but Brad ends up with her anyway I think.

@Saucery

You are a bad influence, noble. I’ve tracked down a copy of Reflections and ordered it.

It’s so interesting! As a mathematician it was a bit of a revelation that English lit type stuff could be interesting when applied to books that I actually liked :)

I don't like sci fi fantasy type stuff

You said you liked Susan Cooper!

I've read a lot of DWJ, but only later, when dd1 was of an age to enjoy them. We had a stage where I had to read a lot of books before she was allowed to read them because she was beyond proper children's books but not quite old enough for the content of the YA stuff. I had to make her wait for quite a few of the Jacqueline Wilson books for example. She didn't have to wait for the DWJ books, so we pretty much read all of them, definitely all the ones in the local or school libraries. She read really quickly so it was great to find an author that she could have unfettered access to without me having to vet them. Some YA books are extremely graphic!!! Since then the local library have split the YA section into 2 sections. One section is in the children's library, and the other is based in the adult library, so it's easier to tell which ones are not suitable for the younger children. D,

And a lecturer I had later in life was Dianne Wynn Jones' sister.

Those girls had a very strange upbringing. What did her sister lecture in?