It's easy to think of politics as the stuff they talk about on politics shows. Being ill at a time of national crisis, has brought me face to face with the fact that politics is about the everyday thing of being alive or - as in my case - trying to stay alive or finding that other people are trying to keep you alive or helping you get on your feet again (rehab). So it is that I've found that at every stage of coming home, there has been a constant political conversation and row going on about - for example - funding of the NHS, how the government approached the idea of an epidemic (social health policy or leave it to the market?), our attitude to old people, sick people, disabled people and vulnerable (so-called) people.
Michael Rosen
A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.
Sunday, 24 April 2022
Why trying to stay alive is political
Saturday, 23 April 2022
Interview with me from Ant Group
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18qJGSf_e4vjfoh5VU4lSU3cZToOgZKYR/view
Paste this into your browser.
Enjoy!
Friday, 8 April 2022
Review of 'What is a Bong Tree?'
By Chris Malone:
"I will try to put my finger on what I loved about What is a Bong Tree. I loved reading it so much that I carried it round the house, allowing myself a break from chores to read another chapter. I engaged in conversation by commenting in pencil in the margins; ‘Yes!’ ‘Haha!’ declaiming, underlining and asterixing.
Michael Rosen says you need stamina to read the ‘whole lot’ but I disagree with him on this point only. The collection is an easy read, especially if, like me, you are interested in the wide-ranging subjects of education, culture, politics, art, poetry, interculturalism, words and relationships. In my view, you simply need time to read the whole lot, and as the chapters are short, your pleasure can be spread over as long a time as you like. No hurry. I was aiming for the final section, ‘Politics, Education, Culture,’ as this attracted me most, but I started at the beginning and indulged in the autobiography, literature and poetry on the way. When I reached the penultimate chapter, ‘Languages of Migration,’ I stopped. I didn’t want the book to end.
The collection of 41 talks and articles in What is a Bong Tree is a luxuriant read with recurring themes and ideas grounded in real (unprivileged) life, with a consistent air of authenticity. Great to read aloud as the words on the page emanate from Michael’s own voice. The storying of the everyday.
So why did I love this book so much?
Firstly, the conversational tone (many of the chapters form written records of speeches and lectures) invites the reader’s participation. The oxymoron of oral writing. I liked this because it made me feel powerful as a reader. I was gifted autonomy. I was enticed to become a literature activist too.
Secondly, I know that I have become a changed person after reading it. Thirty years in the education machine, especially inspecting and working in local authorities, had drummed closed questioning into me. Michael’s ever-present cry that we ask the questions we don’t know the answers to, will stay with me. Embedded. As will his plea for children to choose their own reading material, and for classes to dance the words. We can hope that we will see an end to the stultifying extracts for counterproductive and indeed discriminatory SATs. Exam questions and the need to decode the code … not many of us have seen all this play out as a school parent non-stop for over 40 years, or noticed that the spinners in the newsagent used to be full of ladybird books, but now house spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Throughout the book, numbered lists of suggestions enrich the debate, for example in School Rules, the 10 Elements of Successful Arts Education.’ This book is no mere cerebral indulgence, the collection offers a wealth of practical approaches to effective teaching, at home and in the classroom.
Dive in, and this book might change you too …
Thirdly, as I am sure there will be for many readers, there were several personal hooks which propelled me into my own memories and values. Reading the book was reminiscent of those wonderful Open University units of the 1980s. My TMA (tutor marked assignment) would be entitled, What is a Bong Tree? and they would all laugh. I stormed out of a good traditional university literature degree, to study through the OU. I never felt as proud of my naïve life-changing decision as when I read Michael’s words about the lack of connection being made between English literature and the battle of ideas. Until we read Orwell. That was me, too. The Elizabethan World Picture didn’t provide me with the insight I needed into Greenham Common. Orwell did. And Steinbeck. And D102. And of course, having proudly taught innumerable children to read using a dynamic combination of techniques adapted to each child’s learning style, I revelled in the chapters that lambasted synthetic phonics. The good old days overlayed by Nick Gibbs got a ‘Haha’ in the margin. I passed the eleven plus, attended a secondary modern, and am proud of this. It was the year grammar schools were meant to end, and it grounded me. ‘Emil and the Detectives,’ ‘Junior Voices’. My childhood.
Fourthly, I loved the inclusion of Michael’s poetry, and the well-argued claim that literature is for adults and children together, when books come off the page, become social and belong to everyone. The hot potato poem, the torch, the lift, corned beef, the homework book … and the threads joining today’s experiences to Gradgrind, Miss Havisham, Trabb’s boy. These all resonated with me, as did the claim that English poetry books for children have traditionally featured dead, white, English men.
I also learnt lots of interesting things, about Michael’s unusual Jewish home experiences, peppered with Yiddish, and about the real meaning of Heim. Domestic life as a home university. How many fathers read Great Expectations to their children in a tent? I am sure that many mothers, like mine, ‘collected bits’ for school on walks. This selection is intensely and overtly personal, and gains impetus from that, but it also recognises the equal value of the full range of home experiences. In fact, by the end of the book, Michael upends it all. ‘I mean, just who is culturally deprived?’ ‘Teachers educated away from vernacular and oral working-class cultures have a unique chance to make up for this deprivation in our lives.’
Finally, I revelled in a disrupter’s portrayal of words: words don’t just bob about like lottery balls, they stick together, have secret strings. We can indeed subvert the power relationships between texts and utterances. The current education system in England is, we know deep down, all about ‘conform, conform, conform.’ As Michael says, ‘My son Joe did streets last term and the teacher didn’t even take them into a street.’
So, what is a bong tree? Now I understand, as I wallow in my bath of ideas, it is not only a nonsense, it allows the reader power. Agency. Brilliant!"
Tuesday, 1 March 2022
As if in a dream I hear the radio playing Ukrainian patriotic songs
As if in a a dream
I hear the radio playing Ukrainian patriotic songs
and lovingly produced discussions
about the history of Ukraine
Thursday, 3 February 2022
'The Responder' - tragedy, comedy and 'genre'
I watched 'The Responder' and it got me thinking about tragedy, comedy and genre. Traditionally, tragedy involves such elements as a flawed hero (or more than one main protagonist), who comes into conflict with the customs/culture/politics of the time or, for some reason, is plotted against. The end usually involves the death of the hero/heroes, and possibly some or even many others. While the tragedy unfolds we probably have a sense of doom and danger. There will be transgressions and/or fatal errors along the way. Revenge may be involved too. Traditionally, at the very end, after the deaths, there may well be the expression of renewal.
Comedy may or may not be particularly comic. The defining characteristic of tradition comedy in drama is that all the plot lines resolve. If it involves love and sex, many of the people will end up as couples. On the way, there may well be ironic or even sad or tragic moments but they are, as I suggest, 'on the way'.
There are interesting political differences between the two genres. Tragedy traditionally involves the hero in conflict with the social norms or even the politics of whoever is in power. Comedy may well involve conflict but quite often this is social and will express tensions to do with class or social expectations around the behaviour of men and women.
The main way we have absorbed ideas about tragedy and comedy in Britain has been through Shakespeare and/or films or TV dramas that adopt the motifs and tropes from Shakespeare. Shakespeare, it is said, used Roman tragedy as his model but the plays are said to work some interesting variations on the genres. 'Romeo and Juliet' has two tragic heroes who come into conflict with the social and class ambitions of their parents and the rules of the governing power, but Juliet is more dominant in that respect. 'Twelfth Night' is a comedy but the fate of Malvolio and the commentary from Feste offer us something different.
Shakespeare also created 'problem plays' that don't seem to fall into the traditional categories. 'Measure for Measure' is regarded as a prime example of this. (Aside: I'm not quite sure who the problem plays are a problem for. I rather like 'Measure for Measure'. It doesn't seem to me to be a problem.)
Now to 'The Responder'. As I was watching it, it seemed to be unfolding as a tragedy: we had a flawed hero, who was going against society's norms. There was danger, plenty of error and doom. There was a nasty death (murder), in the later part of the series which seemed to suggest that there was more to come. But no! The series ended with resolution, the main pair and a sub-plot pair overcame their problems and got together. Whatever transgressions there were, (ie crimes), were washed away in the resolution. There was no punishment - actual or metaphorical - for the crimes.
So, was it a mix of traditional genres? We could easily envisage other endings - either the hero gets killed and/or some innocents who got caught in the crossfire. Why did the film-makers not go down that route?
But those questions are irrelevant if it worked. So, did it work, dramatically, emotionally, socially, politically? There seemed to be a social commentary going on to do with people living on the edge, being hard up and trying to solve things illegally. Traditionally, that might well have ended up in death but instead it ended up in the ending we think comedy...hmmm....conundrum.
I'm left with questions and a sense of unease.
(Great acting throughout, though! I was gripped.)
Sunday, 30 January 2022
My father's uncle Martin and the Holocaust
Here's a third piece that I have recently written for History Works and Professor Helen Weinstein to be used by school students for their presentations. It was for this year's Holocaust Memorial day.
At mealtimes
our father would say to us:
‘You know - I had two French uncles
they lived in France.
They were there before the war
but they weren’t there at the end.’
We sat there
not knowing what to think.
‘What happened to them?’
We’d say.
‘I don’t know,’ he’d say
‘They probably died in the camps,’
he’d say.
Camps?
What camps?
We didn’t know about camps
where people went
and never came back..
It was mysterious
and awful.
It made us sad
and afraid.
My brother said
it gave him nightmares…
l thought of the Tower of London
dark grey,
the prison
the torture chamber in there.
I didn’t know what they were really like.
As years went by
I found out about these camps.
I started to research
to find out what happened to my father’s uncles:
I went to libraries
I looked online
I wrote emails.
I went to America
to talk to relatives there.
More libraries
more searching online
more emails.
Bit by bit
I started to find things
about my father’s two uncles.
Martin and Jeschie.
It’s like I was tracking them down.
I found out that Martin and Jeschie
lived in eastern France
but when the war broke out
they - like millions of others
took to the roads.
they fled to the villages and towns of western France
They called it The Exodus.
Let me tell you about what happened to Martin.
I found a trace of him
first in a little seaside place
with a group of others from the east.
Because they were Jewish
they had to wear a yellow star.
One document said that Martin
refused to use his clothing ration
to make the yellow star.
Then he moved to a village inland.
I wondered:
did he run away?
Was he in trouble because he protested about the
yellow star?
He was with his brother-in-law - who was not Jewish -
and they were staying with a landlady.
I wondered
were they hiding?
It was 1943.
Everyone knew that Jews were being rounded up
and deported.
No one knew where they were being deported to
but they knew that no one was coming back.
They called this place Pitchipoï.
One day,
the German Kommandant in the nearest city
issued a command.
‘All Jews present in the region must be arrested in the first hours of January 31, 1944 and they must be transferred as soon as possible to the closed camp of Drancy’.
The command went to the Prefect.
The Prefect gave the command to the Sub-Prefect.
The Sub-Prefect gave the command to the French police:
the gendarmes.
On that One Day
January 31, 1944
at 2.30 in the morning
four gendarmes called at the door of Martin’s landlady.
Martin opened the door,
the gendarmes arrested him
and they took him to the nearby town
where other gendarmes gathered together
all the Jews of the region.
Then the gendarmes wrote up their report.
I wonder did they do this back at the police station
or in the village cafe, perhaps?
They wrote that Martin Rozen
was born on 18 August 1890
in Krosniewice in Poland.
They wrote that he was naturalised French
they wrote that he was of the Jewish race.
They wrote that he was 1m 62 tall.
with dark brown hair,
brown eyes
he had a scar
he had an oval face.
He was wearing yellow cotton trousers
and a grey cotton jacket.
Were these his pyjamas, I wondered.
It was the middle of the night.
He was wearing a Basque beret
- had he put it on to be polite?
I wondered.
He was wearing flat shoes on his feet.
Were they his bedroom slippers?
I wondered.
All four gendarmes signed the report.
That’s what they did on that One Day.
That was their work.
Martin was taken to the Drancy Camp
from there he was taken to Paris Bobigny station
where he was put into a cattle truck
on a train that went straight from Paris
to Auschwitz
This was Convoy 68,
carrying 1500 Jewish men, women and children
on one day February 10 1944.
Out of the 1500, 42 came back.
Martin was not one of them.
I often look
at the gendarmes’ report.
It’s careful.
It’s neat.
it has a lot of detail.
The details of what happened
on that One day
January 31 1944
That’s why my father said to us,
‘You know - I had two French uncles
they lived in France
They were there before the war
but they weren’t there at the end.’
But my father didn’t live long enough
for me to tell him
what I had found out about
what happened to Martin.
He never knew.
Family history and the holocaust
Further to the previous post about Professor Helen Weinstein asking me to write poems for school students to work on as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. This one is for a narrated mime-dance sequence performed by secondary students. I wrote it a few days ago.