All the world IS a stage, where Richard is concerned …
Year 12 face their mock exam this coming Friday, with varying degrees of panic.
So, this week’s QotW is actually a BOGOF offer. I often talk about Richard III being a ‘season finale’ to the History plays. The chameleon quotation above comes from the penultimate episode, as you might remember, people. Richard is – at least until it all begins to unravel for him – the consummate actor.
But don’t just take my word for it:
‘SQUEAKY BUM TIME’: the point towards the end of a football game, or season, when you hold a slender lead but are almost shitting yourself, in case something goes horribly wrong …
– – –
I’m publishing this with a exactly a week to go before my Y12s face their end of year exam – a full exam on everything we’ve done this year: Tennyson‘s ‘Maud’; Marlowe‘s Edward II; and of course, Richard III. Evidence suggests my students are in full ‘squeaky bum’ mode, despite my best efforts to reassure them. And, hey, it’s the World Cup: if Mexico (one of ‘my teams’ can hang on to a 1-0 lead for an hour against Germany, I think you can hang on to what I have taught you this year for another seven days?
You know what to do: especially (for the first question) if you have been reading these …
Marlowe was never going to fit in. In some ways I wish he hadn’t tried so hard – he would have lasted longer.
‘We don’t like mavericks here …’
– is what I was told some years back at my first school. My first school, just to be clear …
It’s not a default position, I promise you – I honestly don’t aspire to be a maverick. It’s simply about my always bearing in mind the attributed words of Einstein: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. So if it demonstrably doesn’t work or doesn’t make sense, you need to find someone else, if you want blind obedience. How do we improve, otherwise? Plus, my teaching mentor gave me advice I’ve never forgotten, and which has served me well (and my students, if results are anything to judge by*). We might paraphrase it as: ‘As long as you know where should be taking the students, don’t stress about abandoning the lesson plan and getting there via another route.‘
So, admittedly, I can be a:
But, surely, no SURELY, this what we aim to foster in our children (what actually we reward in the subject: critical, evaluative thinking and independence of ideas – those terms are on the markschemes, at the top end) … right? Or does education exist to train people into unthinking passivity?
Students laugh when they hear it, but Anne was in deadly earnest …
We have hedgehogs.
I say ‘we’, but I’m appropriating the cute nocturnal visitors at my Snowdonia home (also known as ‘her place‘) …
Having spent most of the week camping in the back garden – yes, by choice – I’ve become a lot more familiar with their comings and goings: their enthusiastic crunching of mealworms (these are spoiled, and resolutely ignore the slugs they are supposed to be eating – I’ve seen them nudge slugs aside with their snouts!); their irritated huffing and snorting when a rival appears at bowl number two, all within a couple of feet of my head.
Which, of course, makes me more sensitive to the hedgehogs – just three of them* – in Shakespeare …
We can give those long dead words tone, inflection, pace … and meaning.
THIS is what we do, students.
We are archaeologists of the written word. Remember that.
We take our soft brushes and gently but resolutely stroke away the accumulated layers of popular misconception, plain bullshit, and systemic Shakesnobbery that surrounds a text until we are left with the bare bones – the words themselves …
Then – armed with contextual knowledge that keeps us somewhere on the Continuum of Plausibility™ – we ‘perform’ (and that is precisely the word, so enjoy the performative aspect of the work) forensic autopsies on those long-dead words: we dissect, analyse and record our findings.
Occasionally, what we’re looking at might seem as alien as some of the stuff Scully chops up in the X-Files, but we persevere, we find points of reference, and with care we perform a kind of necromancy: we can practically bring the sample in front of us to life.
We can give those long dead words tone, inflection, pace … and meaning.
THIS … … … is OCR H472/01 (Drama and Poetry pre-1900), A Level English Literature, section 1, question A … your Shakespeare extract task.
Continue reading “Forensic Friday (#01): RIII I.i.20-21”
Here’s looking at you, H …
So.
It’s been a long, hard, day. No, really! In amongst the pre-school meeting; the marking; the trying to keep your errant Year 11s just on this side of hysteria, given they have their second English Lit exam on Friday; the data (two classes’ worth, by lunchtime, thanks very much); the lunchtime storytelling club for younger pupils; the broken photocopiers; and the almost insignificant matter of actually teaching, you need an oasis of calm.
Or two …
Let battle commence: Shakesparring was the highlight of last week …
Friday found myself and a colleague sacrificing a precious free period (one of only four per week) for the opportunity to Shake-spar … and what fun it was.
Let me set the scene – one of our colleagues in the department was unwell. She also teaches A Level Lit to Year 12, and would have done so in period 2, when I’m free. Two of the students in that class are in my form, so I casually said to them in the morning that if there were ‘any problems‘ relating to that lesson, they ought to come and see me.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to find about a dozen girls at my door at about 09:55?
Having fun exploring the role of literature in preserving an unfair system …
Last week finished with me in full theatrical mode, pacing the classroom like a restless, caged predator, declaiming at full volume (and probably decreasingly coherently), on the likely politics of Marlowe and Tennyson. That’ll teach my Y13s to ask for some ideas on Marxist Literary Criticism (AO5, folks), during Period 6 on a Friday …
Know when to fold em …
PTS read-through: Richard II, Act III (part 2)
(in which Richard shows what a crap poker player he would have made)
An important lesson for students: it is OK to disagree with a critical view – in fact OK to disagree with ME and my ideas. As long as you can argue your opposition to a stance or point of view. I’m about to take issue with Germaine Greer …
Actually, INTERTEXTUALITY is king in English Lit …
Think of this familiar toy as Jan Kott‘s Great Mechanism of History.
With one small difference: imagine that once the cute penguins reach the top – kingship – the next step is not an exhilarating slide but more of a plunge onto the razor-sharp rocks of tragedy. They are immediately replaced by the next penguin (King Penguin? Emperor Penguin?) on his or her own journey to bloody immolation and little more than the proverbial footnote in the history book, if they’re lucky …
‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ [a]
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 