Todays' events in Paris: a response re absolutism and persecution

There is a kind of absolutist radical politics that seeks to have the final showdown with the enemy. In this scenario, anything which brings about this final showdown is of itself good. It follows from this that nothing needs to be built or organised much beyond the cell or group you happen to be in. It follows from this that a major confrontation with people utterly opposed to everything you stand for is better than confrontations with people who would rather talk to you or negotiate with you. So when these 'true' enemies start implementing high security measures and military clampdowns this is a 'success'.


Meanwhile, the absolutist radical group will grow and develop in an environment in which the group can claim that co-nationalists or co-religionists are being killed, massacred or annihilated. At one level this need only be a matter of 'perceived to be massacred etc' but this can be stated with more objectivity than that. In a situation in which there is persecution over many years, there will often be millenarian, 'last days' type movements. These enable members (nearly always men) to appear to renounce common or ordinary existence and find purity in action - no matter the consequences in the here and now. That's because the adherents 'know' that there is a better life beyond. However, all this way of thinking needs persecution in order to prove itself. There's a symbiosis here: the absolutism needs the persecution. The persecution needs the absolutism.

The really difficult route to progress is to oppose both the persecution and the absolutism. And yet that's the only way to break the cycle.

New poem: Footnote

He noticed that a name appeared several times in footnotes.

The name had, it said, provided some information. In another

place, the name had, it said, been present. In yet another, the

name had, it said, offered an amusing opinion. The name was

never in full, always with initials; the surname spelled slightly

differently - sometimes with an ‘l’ sometimes not. He tried to

find out more: he googled, he sent emails to people who

would have been or could have been mutual acquaintances;

he wrote to places where the name might have been educated. It

wasalways nothing. Polite apologies but no information available.

He began to doubt if the person existed. What if the name had at

first been invented as a witness in order to bulk up a a tenuous

proposition or serve as evidence to a story that wasn’t entirely

true? What if, there had followed, since then, a process of

quotation of quotation but authors had failed to mention the

middleman? Or was there a knowing joke passing between people

whereby, the name could serve as an available backup of the

truth of any old event or conversation: the name was there, the name

had seen it, the name could vouch for it? He made contact with

authors who had cited the name and received evasive replies:

papers were now in archive and he didn’t have time now

to pull them out; or, yes, there had been an intermediary but it

seemed at the time pedantic to mention it; the exact citation had

been taken from a radio programme which hadn’t been

preserved, and so on and so on. One said that she had met

the name as part of her original research. He arranged a meeting

in a cafe in Paddington. She didn’t turn up. He tried again. She

was in the midst of moving. He tried again. Her mother was dying.

He tried again. She had re-married and her husband preferred

her not to have contact with previous liaisons. Around this time,

he noticed in one book that a quote he had seen attributed to the

name was attributed to someone else. He wrote to the author. The

author said that it was indeed something he said and he had never

heard of the name. In fact, it was something he was quite proud of

having said and suspected thatthe name was someone who had

wished he had said it himself. Now the name seemed to be taking

on a motive: envy. He was bitter. Yes, that was it, he must have felt

excluded. And had found a way in by adopting the clever sayings of

others. No, surely he was the opposite: he acknowledged that deep

down he was the little guy but to be a footnote was in some ways a

big thing. Two footnotes was bigger. Three footnotes - massive.

Somewhere in a one-room flat, the name was sitting surrounded with

books and articles in which he was a footnote.

Phonics - Stephen Krashen takes up cudgels - again

This is a letter to 'The Australian' sent by Professor Stephen Krashen


Re: "Teacher training fails on literacy" (Jan. 6, 2015)
The Australian fully accepts the assertion of the NSW Board of Studies that that explicit, systmatic phonics is supported by research, and joins the report in scolding universities that do not emphasize it in teacher education.
The writers of the report are clearly unaware that study after study shows that those who have endured explicit, systmatic phonics, a method that demands that we teach all major rules of phonics in a strict order to all children, results in better performance only on tests in which children pronounce words presented on a list, in isolation. Explicit, intensive phonics has no effect on tests in which children have to understand what they read.
Rejection of explicit, systematic phonics not does exclude the teaching of "basic" phonics. A small amount of consciously learned knowledge of the rules of phonics can help in the beginning stages to make some texts more comprehensible, but there are severe limits on how much phonics can be learned and applied because of the complexity of many of the rules.
This conclusion is consistent with the views of Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman who have, for decades, presented strong evidence that our ability to decode complex words is the result of reading, not the cause.
Stephen Krashen, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Children's Literature Interest Group Interview

Children's Literature Interest Group Interview with Michael Rosen

Image source Michael Rosen website

Michael Rosen is one of the best known figures in the children's book world and the British arts scene. He has written numerous award-winning poetry books, non-fiction and picture books. He is also a journalist, broadcaster, performer, who visits schools in the UK and abroad with his one-man show. He was Children's Laureate from 2007-9, using the post to be "an ambassador of fun."

A new edition of the classic poetry collection YOU TELL ME ME! by Michael Rosen and Roger McGough is published by Frances Lincoln Children's Books in January 2015. New poems are included in this edition and it is illustrated by Korky Paul.

What does poetry mean to you?

It mostly means 'saying important things in small spaces'. It can also mean 'memorable speech', 'making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar', it can mean 'finding out what a moment can come to represent' and talking of moments, poetry can be the moment that a story or a play didn't have time to tell us.

Why is poetry important for children?

Most of education is concerned with getting things finished, right and put away in exercise books. Reading and writing poetry is another way of looking at the world: it can involve being suggestive, tentative and tangential. It has the potential of raising more questions than it can answer. It can scavenge the world's utterances for material which it recycles, parodies, cuts up, re-arranges, often with the result of letting us see how language works. This means that poetry is good at revealing our deceptions, self-deceptions, exaggerations. It can also examine how it is we look at the world through language - that's to say, how we 'textualise' the world. Poetry is wonderful at both doing this but also in investigating how we do it.

Elsewhere in the curriculum, there is hardly ever time or willingness to do this. Poetry can often do it very quickly and wittily. We need it to sharpen our wits in a world in which we are constantly asked to look the other way.

When did you start writing poetry for children?

I think I first knew that I was writing a poem for children when I tried to help my mother with her BBC Schools Radio programmes. That was in the late 1960s, early 1970s.

What part did poetry play in your own childhood?

My parents recited a lot of poetry, taught it in their schools, talked about it, played gramophone records of it, listened to it on the radio. Geoffrey Summerfield asked for their advice when he was putting together Voices and Junior Voices for Puffin Education. A lot of the poems from those books were laid out on our sitting room floor and I was asked to read them too. At school, we sometimes recited poems. I belonged to a choral speaking group at primary school. The first time poetry meant something important to me was when I was in second year secondary school and we looked at Browning's dramatic monologues - especially the one known as 'My last duchess'. I thought that this was clever, powerful, creepy, political, brilliant and I knew that I wanted to write things like that

Which poets or poems do you most admire and why? Or which have been most influential in your own development as a poet?

Very hard to select, as I quite often like poetry that I could never write myself or even want to write.

Starting 'long' - I love the Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare's soliloquies and the Pied Piper, Ancient Mariner, Wreck of the Deutschland
Medium - Browning's dramatic monologues
Short - I very much like French surrealist poems, and prose poems. Likewise Raymond Carver.  I think Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon did something magnificent and unmatchable with their whole WW1 oeuvre.  I'm still amazed by Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry. I think the 'violence' he did to the language is wonderful - high risk, original, powerful.
Contemporary - I very much like John Agard, Jackie Kay, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Adrian Mitchell, Simon Armitage.
I really like Gil Scott-Heron who is not usually listed as a 'poet' but I'm not too worried about that.
I really like Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg from the early part of the 20th century.
I really like the 'confessional' poetry of Anne Sexton.

Do you follow a regular process in creating your poetry? Do you draft your poems?

Quite often they start from a jotted note…I don't get them right first time, but I wouldn't call them drafts…they are rather in a state of unfinishedness until I think they're finished.

Do you read your poems aloud?

Mostly yes.

Which are your favourite poetic forms and why? Are there any you would still like to try?

I don't have a favourite. I like rhyme and regular rhythms if I'm being satirical, or if I'm trying to convey something ongoing or relentless. I very much like the short prose poem format pioneered by Baudelaire. And I like my rambling stand-up monologues…which of course some people say are not poems.

When you write poems, do you have a target audience in mind?

Most of the time, yes, though recently I've been deliberately trying to write some things where I'm trying to discover the audience by writing it! That's quite hard to describe . There's an idea in my head that hasn't got an audience. I wonder to myself, how shall I write it? I start to write. I start to wonder who might be interested in it. I carry on writing and as I write I start to imagine people I know finding this or that interesting. The people change as I write…this person more than that person…the poem starts to find who I think is it's potential audience. Ha! - then later I may well find that I'm wrong.

Which topics influence your poetry?

I guess I'm interested in irony, absurdity, our unawarenesses of what we say and do, intriguing sights which seem to imply something other than what they are.

How would you describe your poetry?

A lot of it is interested in recounting foibles, misunderstandings, small disasters. Another chunk of it is nearer to traditional nonsense poetry. Some of it is based very strongly in people's speech.

How do you see the role of illustration in poetry books for children?

Word and image interact. Image doesn't really 'illustrate'. So the eye and the mind goes in relay between word and image. This is an active interpreting move that the mind does and I very much like it as a process.

What do you think children get from your poems?

I hope that they get to see aspects of themselves, and aspects of their parents in many of the poems. I hope that this gives them permission to have a go at writing things like that themselves and to read many other poets' poems.

How do you stop writer's block?

Usually, it's by not trying to write anything if I don't feel like it. Then I'll come across something which starts the 'itch' that means in my mind: 'write me'. So I write, to relieve the itch.

Of all the poems you have written, which is your favourite?

I think it's the sequence I've called 'Michael's Big Book of Bad Things'. There are four parts to it, which I split up across 'Michael Rosen's Big Book of Bad Things'.

In this digital age, do you think technology in creating and/or promoting poetry for children?

Oh yes. I've put over 90 poems of mine on YouTube and they've had in all 8.5 million views. I also put new poems up on my website, my blog and Facebook and link to them on twitter.

Can you tell us two secrets about yourself?

I like the smell of Paco Rabane 'Pour Homme'.
I wish I had tried to sing and play harmonica in a blues band.

What advice can you give to aspiring poets?

Find some poets and poetry you really like. Copy out or learn bits of it.
Keep a notebook of words, phrases, ideas, that you find or think of.
Read your notebook and see if it triggers off things to write.

Football thoughts

Argument - the first phase of organised football coincided with full scale industrialisation. It corralled some of the people’s carnivalesque leisure into compounds (stadiums) and divided the working class along local lines. The rules and training systems matched factory systems of clocking on. All this is in contrast to some of the ways in which pre-organised, pre-rules football worked which involved a kind of mass violent carnival.




The present phase of football coincides with globalisation and extreme commodification of leisure. So, players in top teams are mostly migrants, capitalisation is international,  and the game can be segmented into many formats (highlights, great players, histories of clubs, histories of leagues etc) to be sold and re-sold many times over.




In the first phase of industrialised football, football was bought on match day, and then, to a limited extent, in other formats through newspapers, comics, annuals, cigarette cards and the like. Without running the economics on this, I suspect that these spin-offs were not crucial to the financing and existence of top flight football. Perhaps this spin-offs worked mostly as publicity which helped guarantee high audiences on match day.




In the present phase, the formats are at the highest end of technology, involving millions of pounds of investment in production and reach into the majority of homes as consumption. This is crucial to the existence of the top echelons of the sport. This consumption is more valuable than the game itself.




So, now there is the ‘game’ which actually takes place. It is not entirely predictable, but as someone admitted the other day, the position of a club in the top flight is pretty well dependent on a given club’s wage bill. (nb not necessarily dependent on the total cost of its footballing asset when bought ie the cost of buying a player). In any given season, it may well be that this league table of wage bills doesn’t exactly match the final league position but over time it evens out, as some clubs will over- or under-perform according to the wage bill criterion.




So, the game is not quite so much of a game as first appears. Therefore, part of the job of the commodification is to stress that it is a game! Otherwise, people would be less inclined to buy it in its many formats.




In the meantime, as with any form of production, immense levels of skill and co-operation are brought to bear on the matter - whether that’s skills of individual players, skills of co-operation, training, presentation, stadium-building and so on. These aren’t negated by the above comments about commodification. Players and managers show us the potential of human capabilities and aptitudes. Yet, many (not all) people involved in the game are education ‘failures’. Schooling as devised at present finds it difficult to give football ‘skills’ any great status other than when ‘the team’ makes the school look good. In terms of league tables (!) of GCSE results and the like, it’s nothing.




If we look at those skills though, in other times, we might say that they could or would have coincided with eg hunting - being able to direct an object over distance with great accuracy. Or planning for hunting ie how to outwit a moving object or objects eg a herd of animals. In the modern day, we might simply be economistic about it and say, that ‘leisure’ is an industry like any other, so why should we say that someone doing the qualifications required for law or accountancy is a more worthwhile person (in academic terms) than someone doing what’s necessary to become a footballer? Under modern capitalism, don’t the leisure industries (so-called) provide as many opportunities (albeit varying from huge salaries to small ones) as any other industry?




So why does education discriminate on this matter?




I can think of reasons why it might suit one kind of discrimination to funnel certain kinds of young people into ‘leisure’ studies and away from academic studies of science, maths and humanities.






So, my question is: how do you prevent the kind of discrimination which blocks students off from doing things, whilst giving full status to capabilities, aptitudes and skills of all kinds?

Sedgehill: story of a school being forced to be an academy

Hi Michael


I've long followed your support of schools under threat of academisation. I'm the mother of two children at Sedgehill, a community comprehensive in Lewisham. The school was in a very bad way four years ago. Morale was low, numbers on roll were falling, and the Head resigned suddenly. Ken McKenzie took over and completely transformed the school. It's now a very special place - a true community where every child is accepted, no matter what their background or level of academic achievement, and where their potential is nurtured, whether it be with free music tuition, dance training, time in the recording studio, training with Fulham Football Club, mentoring younger children, being involved in the Youth Parliament or learning to be a Young Entrepeneur.


GCSE results have been steadily rising, until a dip this year caused by changes to the system (and shared by many many schools across the country) was taken as a cue by Lewisham council to intervene.


They instructed the board of governors to replace the Head with their own choice, the Head of Bethnal Green Academy. When the Governors refused, they were given notice that an application was being made to impose an Interim Executive Board to disband the governors, sack the Head and take over the running of the school.


This is against the wishes of the entire school community. The school is NOT failing; it has lifted from special measures to inadequate to requires improvement (the category that was until recently called satisfactory). Although at the 2013 inspection it was still at a 3 (requires improvement) the school is confident that when next inspected it will achieve a 2 (good).


Although the council are saying that a full consultation on academisation will be held after the imposition of the IEB, it will then be too late. Sacking the leadership team and handing the school over to the control of an Academy Executive Head will irretrievably alter the character and ethos of the school and rob our children of the chance to be part of a school community we believe in.


If there is any way that you can help to shine light on this situation, then please do. We were informed just over a week ago, and we understand the application for the IEB is being made tomorrow, despite a 1,600 signature petition, a barrage of emails from concerned parents, and a demonstration outside the town hall attended by hundreds of students.


There is a Twitter group @savesedgehill where you can find out more.

I Caught Farage on the train reading 'Lessons in Scapegoating'

"Lessons in Scapegoating"
1. Identify a group of people as the 'other'. Do this by remarking on aspects of their life you can say are 'different' even though you or your family have those aspects too. Useful 'differences' may be such things as what language people speak, clothes they wear or how people stand in the street. Sporting allegiance is useful too. Don't worry about contradictions e.g. that your partner speaks another language, or that you stand about in the street too.


2. These 'other' people must be identified as causing a lowering of people's standards of living. It is vital that the core people with real power in the country are not identified as lowering people's standards of living.

3. Indicate that these 'other' people can be and will be 'removed' in some way or another. Never indicate how they will be removed as past records on this matter are sensitive. When anyone says to you, Are you going to remove these 'other' people, deny it immediately. It doesn't matter either way - the point has been made. People will vote for you because they believe that you will 'get rid' of these 'other' people.

4. Never fill in any detail about how 'removal' of these 'other' people would affect the standard of living of those remaining. Just make vague mentions of 'work permits'. This gives the impression that 'other' people can be reduced to being a 'work permit' and that they can be cut off from partners, parents and children. They can just be hired and then 'sent back'.

5. It's vital to link such things as 'crime' to these 'other people' as if crime was invented by them. Any criminal activity on the part of people in your party or the 'people' (i.e. the not-other people) should be overlooked.

6. It's vital to suggest that the 'people' own the country and that it's been taken away from them by the 'other people'. The fact that the country is owned by a tiny, tiny group of extremely wealthy people should not be mentioned. In fact, the fact that this has always been the case should not be mentioned either. It's vital to keep the idea going that ordinary people 'own' the country and it's been 'taken away' from them by 'other' people who are not the tiny group of extremely wealthy people.