I've written this before, so ignore it if you've read it.If you are interested in going beyond 'retrieval' and 'inference' with your pupils, students - or indeed with yourself, and you want to help anyone get into 'interpretation', here are four open-ended questions which you can use as a kind of core method:
1. Is there anything in this text that reminds you of anything that has happened to you or to anyone you know?
2. Is there anything in this text that reminds you of anything that you've ever read, or viewed as, say, a play, film, TV programme, etc.?
3. Is there any question that you would like to ask the writer or anybody or indeed any 'thing' in this text?
4. Can you answer any of those questions yourself?
In ideal circumstances, the best framework for asking these questions is small groups - with some larger group sharing.
Each of the questions can have supplementaries - particularly for older students e.g. 'why do you think that moment in the text makes you think of that particular thing that happened to you/ or that you've read in that other book?' Those supplementaries will take students to close points of comparison and difference. As a teacher or enabler, you have to be patient, accept what might appear as banal, or off-beam, in order that pupils and students can feel confident and entitled. And you have to have an open belief in the power of the groups and the larger group to debate and arrive at points of agreement and disagreement. In classes where there has been some tension between people, you insist on the 'respect agenda' i.e. 'do as you would be done by'.
In an atmosphere, where this kind of process happens quite often, the teacher/enabler can offer his/her thoughts but it's always advisable to not swamp the pupils'/students' voices. The cunning use of 'I don't know' when pupils and students ask you for definitive answers can generate more debate not less!
Friday 30 January 2015
Wednesday 28 January 2015
Financial constraints - me arse.
Here's how normality works.
On the Today programme we heard a woman from the NHS say: "...the financial constraints we're under in this country".
Then later we heard an item how "Apple put their profits in a tax haven…"
(In fact they borrow money against these profits (presumably at a very low interest rate) and buy bonds in their own company (presumably offsetting it all against tax)….search me, I don't fully figure that bit of the fiddle, but it 'saves' them millions, and takes it away from tax take in US, UK etc etc…)
If Apple are doing it, then so are others….
"Financial constraints…" - me arse.
New poem: The Economy - we love to hear that it's doing well
The ‘economy’...how we love to hear that the
economy is doing well, the economy is picking up,
there’s a strong economy. When we hear that, we
know that things are looking good. Things are
getting better. The economy. How we love the
economy when it’s doing well. If fact, you can be
doing very badly when the economy is doing well.
That doesn’t matter, though. If you know the
economy is doing well, you feel good. In fact, many
hundreds of thousands of people may be doing
very badly, and still the economy might be doing
well. How mysterious. How could that be? Could
it be that the economy is doing well precisely
because hundreds of thousands of people are
doing badly? Could it be that when people are
paid less or hardly anything at all, this makes it
easier for very few people to make much more?
Could it be that what goes for the ‘economy’ is
really a way of talking about how successful are
those people at doing well out of paying people
less or hardly anything at all? Yes, an economy
can be doing well, with people begging in the
street. Never mind that, though. The economy is
doing well. We love to hear that. Even the beggars
love to hear that. They can’t afford a radio or TV
so you’ll have to tell them. Why not pop down to
a soup kitchen near you and say, ‘Hello everyone,
the economy is doing well, the economy is strong’?
They’ll love it.
Tuesday 27 January 2015
Tory UK
Cameron interview this morning on the Today programme…I think I understand him...
The Tory UK is a low wage UK, low benefits UK, low tax UK, small welfare state UK, big profits UK.
The Tory UK is more people working for less money UK. A few super-rich people making more money and paying less tax UK.
The Tory UK is having less chance of the state being able to look after you in times of need UK.
All this is what he means by a 'strong' economy UK.
Gottit, Dave UK.
Monday 26 January 2015
For teachers and all wanting to teach or understand Holocaust Memorial Day
What is Racism?
It's a clockmender who left his country to get a better living
and all is fine
until things start changing
there's an invasion
he and his wife run to another town
and the people who are supposed to keep law and order
decide to put him and his wife on a list
and then they decide that they will make them wear a special badge
marking them out as different
and then they decide that they will take all their money away from them
and the clockmender and his wife have nothing much more they can do
but sell old clothes in the market
where they must put a special badge on their stall marking them out
as different
and they send letters to America for help from their relatives
and they hear stories about how people like them are being shot
and transported to places where they never come back from]
so they run again
and they hear rumours of a place where they'll be safe
and they get there somehow
and then someone from the army that invaded
arrives and he hates people like the clockmender
and his wife and he has lists
and with the help of the people
who are supposed to keep law and order
he gets hold of the clockmender and his wife
and he puts them on a train to a housing estate
which has been converted into a kind of prison
and from there they are shipped to a big station
and from there they are shipped out of the country
to a special place where people will work till they die
where people are tortured
where people starve to death
where people fall ill and have no means of being cured
where people are shot
where people are gassed to death
and the clockmender and his wife
are never seen again..
No one in their family knows what happened to them
for years and years
until one of the letters that the clockmender sent to America
turns up
and bit by bit one of the people in the family
finds the books that have the lists of the people
who like the clockmender were rounded up and shipped out
and bit by bit he puts the story together
he doesn't fully know why he's doing this
other than that he doesn't want it to be
that no one knows
he doesn't want it to be that people specialise
in saying that such things didn't happen
so he finds out more and more about the clockmender and his wife
and the clockmender is called Oscar, known as Jeschie
and his wife is Rachel
and Oscar is Oscar Rosen who was my father's uncle
and now you know
what I found out
now you know what I wanted you to know
and now I know
that this isn't something that
no one knows.
[Here's a photo of a Memorial Plaque that has been put up in Oscar and Rachel's hometown and you'll see their names in the top right hand corner. Apologies, I don't seem to be able to make it a live link, so please copy and paste it into your browser and it will become 'live']
http://memorial-genweb.org/~memorial2/html/fr/photo.php?id_source=36913
My Talk for the UK Literacy Association, July 2014
The other day I got a tweet from someone called Cath Beard. There was a photo of a very young child sitting with a board book. The tweet said:
5yr old read the 1yr old 'We're going on a bear hunt' this morning. Here she is reading it to hrslf
My first thought was, well that’s nice. And then I thought some more. Surely there’s some mistake here. Assuming all the facts are as stated, then a 5 year old reading ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ is either wrong or misguided or both. ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ is not phonically regular throughout, the ‘tricky words’ or ‘red words’ are not clearly marked, the book is much too heavily illustrated, the words are much too easily learned off by heart, the final page has no words on it at all. I think we should assume that the children in question are not only not-decoding but that they are in great danger. They are in great danger of what ex-schools Minister Nick Gibb told me happens - namely of being confused by multi-cuing strategies, which will let them down later on when they try to decode words that they haven’t come across.
I will assume that this room is full of people who learned how to read. While we were learning to read, there were some children who did not. According to present orthodoxies, there is one reason and one reason only for that. Or to nuance it a little, there would have been only one remedy for that. One account of that position - (that there would have been only one remedy for some of our companions not learning how to read) - this lone remedy should be applied to all children, including the child reading ‘We’re going a bear hunt’ to her baby sister. I understand this as a marketing ploy. I’’m not sure I understand it as a piece of educational policy. After all, one of the watchwords of educational policy is choice. Not in learning how to read, it seems.
So we should ask, I think: Is there any other part of the school curriculum that applies a one-size-fits-all method quite so rigidly? If, as I think, there isn’t another part of the curriculum being treated in that way, can we ask, what is so special about learning to read that it requires this one-size-fits-all method?
Meanwhile, back with the people in this room learning to read. If we weren’t taught by:
i) at least a half hour a day of systematic synthetic phonics,
ii) readers graded according to these principles, and
iii) taught on the principle of ‘first, fast and only‘.
How did we manage?
I learned how to read in several ways - simultaneously. I said ‘simultaneously‘ in that rather sententious, loaded way, because that word is itself, highly controversial. I am told on a daily basis that it’s either impossible or undesirable for children to learn how to read for meaning and learn how to decode at the same time. I am told over and over again, that first you learn how to decode, then you learn how to understand. Meanwhile, I am now being told that in fact, I am wrong when I have said in the past that ‘decoding‘ and ‘reading with understanding‘ are different. Apparently, there are some now who say, that for most native speakers of English, to decode is to ‘read with understanding‘ because they know the meaning of all the words they are decoding. And that is because the words in the phonics’ schemes are so simple that it can be assumed that the readers will know what they mean anyway.
And then….and then...
The snag with all talk of learning how to read, there is always an ‘and then’. Well, several actually. One of the big ‘and thens’ is what happens when you meet a word you can’t decode? What do you do then? And, another ‘and then’ is the question of what happens when you meet a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter or a book that you can ‘decode’ but can’t understand? What strategies will you use? What strategies are available? What strategies work?
Have the five year old and the one year old in that tweet got anything to offer in this conversation? Or are they in danger? And wrong?
So I go back to my own first reading experiences.
I was born in May 1946 and the first schooling in reading that I remember happened in September 1951 in Pinner Wood Primary School. I was on what was called the ‘Old Lob Approach to Reading’ . In the Picture Book - “Old Lob and his family’, along with the matching cards, I was introduced to 61 words. In the following book, ‘At Old Lob’s’ I was introduced to 14 more.
In ‘At Old Lob’s’ - I quote from the preface -
‘...every story about Old Lob and his animal family is presented in two forms. First, the story is told in a sequence of pictures wherein new words are introduced. The pupil thus connects a new word with a specific picture, and can refer back to the picture if he fails to recognize the word subsequently. In its second form the story is presented as a little play which uses the vocabulary of the preceding sequence pictures, but in a slightly different form. The play thus becomes a test of work done through the pictures and an opportunity for the child to use his new reading vocabulary in an interesting, conversational way.
It is assumed that while the pupil is reading ‘At Old Lob’s’ and using the individual material to accompany it, his phonic powers are being developed so that by the time he is ready for Book One (‘The Move’) he will be able to recognize as wholes the one-syllabled words containing a short vowel sound which occur in the context of that book.
...
Teachers who prefer an approach to phonics through single letter sounds will find the material for this in the Teachers’ Manual...The phonic tables at the end of this book can be used for phonic practice in connection with either of these methods.’
Meanwhile the theory behind this practice is spelled out in ‘The New Beacon Readers, Teachers’ Manual’. My copy dates from after the original edition of 1926 - so I can’t sure that my teachers were trained in exactly the same way.
I would like to read you a longish chunk of this because there is quite a lot of misinformation passed around about the theory and practice of the good old days. I come from the good old days, so I think this is very relevant. Please note, I’m not reading this out because I agree or disagree with it. I’m reading it out for the historical record - which is much disputed: pp 5-10
‘The act of reading - getting meaning from the printed page - is dependent upon two factors: (1) a mastery of the tools or the mechanics of reading; and (2) the ability of the reader to interpret the thought of what is read. The success and efficiency with which small children are taught to read depends upon the development of these two factors, and the maintenance of an adequate balance between them. Although the way in which reading is taught in some instances may seem to suggest that these factors are incompatible and incapable of development one with the other, a careful consideration of the reading habit can lead to but one conclusion - both an ability to recognize words in the printed page, and an ability to understand the meaning that lies behind them, are at the very basis of correct and efficient reading habits.
For a long time reading methods as developed in many schools have shown an inclination to place far too much emphasis on purely mechanical factors - usually in the form of phonics. One result of these over-emphasized mechanical methods is that much trivial, uninteresting, and sometimes meaningless matter has found its way into infant primers and readers. The feeble attempt to defend such matter is that it affords drill for a partially developed system of phonics. The thoughts and interests of children, even of very small children, cannot possibly be expressed adequately and naturally in words of two, or three, or four letters. The attempt so to express them, and to hold the pupils’ interest with material so conceived, greatly increases the difficulty learning to read. If we ask a child in the infant school, or in the lower standards, to read something that is more or less without meaning, or that contains more or less unfamiliar words and phrases - as do many purely phonic readers - the child cannot do other than proceed slowly and laboriously letter by letter. Reading under these conditions degenerates into a mere vocal exercise - the calling of words in sequence. The unfamiliar nature of such material makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for the child to grasp any meaning that may lie behind the printed page.
To spend a long time in teaching the letter sounds and in word building before allowing the child to commence reading renders his work much more irksome than it need be. On the other hand, to identify a few sounds with their symbols, and to attempt their use in so-called reading matter, begets “word calling” that is not in any sense real reading for interesting content. Emphasis on phonics - on the building up of words letter by letter, is not in itself sufficient to make the child an efficient reader. Phonics are but a device and an invaluable accompaniment to the well-conceived reading method, not a method in themselves. Recognition in reading does not proceed letter by letter but in word-wholes, in phrase-wholes, and sometimes in sentence-wholes. Too much emphasis on phonics is almost as likely to defeat the acquisition of correct and rapid habits of recognition as too little attention to them. “
The author is James H. Fassett.
In practice, I was learning how to read by reading this - this is what the preface called ‘the little play’:
p.32 ‘At Old Lob’s’
Percy
Mother Hen! Mother Hen!
Miss Tibs is up a tree.
She is afraid to come down.
What can we do?
Mother Hen
Run for Mr. Dan, Percy.
He will help Miss Tib.
Percy
Mr. Dan! Mr. Dan!
Miss Tibs is up a tree.
She is afraid to come down.
What can we do?
Mr Dan
Run for Old Lob, Percy.
He will help Miss Tibs.
I remember really liking my ‘Old Lob’ books.
By the way, it rather seems as if people in government think that learning to read by ‘look and say’ methods was something invented by dope-smoking hippies intent on tricking poor children out of the right to read, let me show you, ‘The Merry Readers - a whole word method of learning to read’ by H. Ada Beeny published in 1915.
Here’s the contents list from Book I
Jack and Jill went up the hill
Hickory, Dickory, Dock!
‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’
‘Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man’
Little Tommy Tucker
The North Wind doth blow
Little Jack Horner
If I had a donkey
My little pussy
Old chairs to mend
Girls and boys come out to play
Little Boy Blue
‘Pussy-cat, Pussy-cat, where have you been!’
Three blind mice
Hey, diddle, diddle
Tom, Tom, the piper’s son
There was a crooked man
Jack and Jill
Hush-a-bye, baby
Humpty Dumpty
There was an old woman
The five little pigs
My little pony
Ride a cock-horse
See-saw! Margery Daw!
Little Polly Flinders
Little Miss Muffet
Ding, Dong, Bell
Simple Simon
Robin Redbreast and Puss
‘Where are you going, my pretty maid?’
Looby Loo
Mary’s little lamb
Little Bo-peep
Cock a Doodle Doo!
When the snow is on the ground
Here we go round the Mulberry Bush
Three little kittens
I can’t speak for my friends of the early 1950s, but in my case, this wasn’t the only way in which I was learning what James Fassett called the ‘mechanics’ or again what he calls ‘interpretation’. What else was helping me to do what Fassett calls ‘understand the meaning that lies behind’ ‘the words in the printed page’?
My father sang a lot of songs, which we learned. Most of these were in English but some were in French, German and one or two in Yiddish or with Yiddish words in them. My mother read every night to me from as early as I can remember. As I am a younger brother, I suspect that I was that younger child who snuggles in with the older ones and hears what is sometimes called ‘older material’ but incredibly doesn’t mind. Amongst these books are the Beatrix Potter range, most of which we owned, the first in the series of Puffin Picture Books, which were a mix of fiction and non-fiction, the Orlando books, Babar the Elephant, and the English versions of the Pere Castor Books from France much influenced by Russian and Czech artists and which were hybrid fiction-nonfiction books with a libertarian undertow linked to an educational system founded by Paul Faucher, known as ‘New Education’.
Incidentally, anyone interested in the cross-fertilisation between Soviet, French, English and American books from the early 1930s through to the early 1950s should look at ‘Drawn Direct to the Plate’, Noel Carrington and the Puffin Picture Books’ by Joe Pearson (2010) - a remarkable account of how the idea of producing cheap, multi-coloured, imaginative, creative large format picture books for very young children spread around the world. I am in part a product of this movement - and it was a movement - just as much as I am indebted to my teachers of the Beacon Readers, Mrs Hurst and Miss Thomas of Pinner Wood Primary School.
I also learned to read at the meal-table, in the street and on holidays. I have a clear memory of wanting to know what it said on the food packaging on our table - one good reason for not dispensing everything into jugs and serving dishes. My brother in particular was keen to decipher and explain everything. In the streets, I would go shopping with either or both of my parents and they were keen to help me read shop-names and signs in shops. I was particularly fascinated by a shop where we lived called ‘Payantake’. I’ll spell that. All one word. I now realise that this was one of the first serve yourself supermarkets. But there was also Maynards the newsagents, Sketchley’s the dry cleaners, Swannell and Sly the estate agents, Pats Pantry for toys, the Old Oak Tea Rooms, Beaumonts the newsagents, Vassars the newsagents, Ellements for funerals, the Oddfellows Arms, The Queens Head, the Red Lion, the estate agents we lived over, Norman and Butt, the caff next door, Cosmo’s, the Midland Bank, the Electricity Service Centre, Greatbatch the cobblers, the Co-operative Wholesale Store and of course Woolworth’s . I learned to read all these names.
I was particularly fascinated by all the words on the station, the signs, the directions, and the ads for things like Virol a rather delicious sticky tonic. On the handles of the trains it said in curly writing engraved into brass, ‘Live in Metroland’. We lived in Metroland. This was the name for where we lived.
On holidays, from 1950 onwards, we alternated between camping on farms, and going to France. My mother kept scrap books of train tickets, bus tickets, boat tickets, sweet wrappers, food boxes, leaflets from museums and ancient sites. We pored over these when we came back. I learned to say the words in French. My brother kept a logbook which he read to me.
When we visited my father’s sister, her daughters did puzzles. They always had puzzle books which they showed me how to do. When we visited my mother’s parents, her mother would tell long stories about how either she, or my mother’s father, or my mother’s brother had been cheated. When I went to the park with my mother’s father, he met up with other men in dark blue suits like him and they spoke a language I didn’t understand - Yiddish.
On all our holidays, my father had maps. He was always pointing out the names of places, sometimes making up rhymes about them. He also made up songs about the people we went camping with.
At home, my parents read the newspaper, one of which was the Daily Worker. In the corner of one of the pages there was a ‘Children’s Corner’. Here’s a poem about it:
When I was 7 this happened:
David Kellner came up to me at school and said,
You are, aren’t you?
What?
No, you are, I know you are, you are aren’t you?
I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean, I said.
My mum says you are and she knows
she says she knows you are from your name.
What?
You’re Jewish aren’t you?
I think so, I said.
There you are then, David Kellner said
well, my mum says you should come to the synagogue
and do Hebrew Classes.
So I went home and said,
Er David Kellner says I should go to synagogue
and do Hebrew Classes.
I see, mum said.
Hebrew classes were run by Mrs Kellner
but there wasn’t a synagogue yet.
It was a corrugated iron methodist chapel
without any methodists in it.
Zeyde [Granddad] thought it was hysterical:
‘So Michael’s going to kheder! [Hebrew Classes] Michael’s going to kheyder!
Zeyde didn’t go to shul [synagogue] either,
he went to Hackney Downs instead
and stood around with a lot of old men in dark suits
with shiny bits on the tukhes [bum] of their gatkes [trousers].
At Hebrew classes Mrs Kellner who was very small
and had a huge and wonderful bosom
taught me the letters.
I could only remember two of them.
They both looked like the letter seven
but they each had a dot in a different place.
One of them had the dot over the top
and the other one had the dot in the middle.
How do you tell the difference? said Mrs Kellner,
I’ll tell you.
(I never did David Kellner that I was impressed by
his mother’s wonderful bosom)
What happens, she said
when you get hit by a football over your head?
You say OH!
And what happens
if you get hit by a football in your kishkes [guts]?
You say OOOH!
There you are:
that’s how you tell the difference.
One says OH! And the other says OOOH!
This, I remember
but I left Hebrew Classes
after they shouted at me on the outing to Chessington Zoo.
You don’t have to learn Hebrew
from people who shout at you at Chessington Zoo.
Through all these activities, not just one of them, I learned that reading was not something you did purely and only in school with a Beacon Reader. I learned that English was not the only language in the world. I learned that letters could be used in different ways for different languages. I learned that there were letters other than the ones used in school and you could read using them. I learned that you could borrow language and use it for yourself. I learned that you could play with language and unpredictable and funny meanings came out: my father sang:
‘The higher up the mountain
the sweeter grows the grass
the higher up the donkey climbs
the more it shows its face’.
He said his mother had taught him that and that she had learned it from when she and the family lived in America. That means it dates from before 1922.
On Saturdays we went to the local library. There was a children’s room and we were allowed to borrow 2 or 3 books at a time. My parents would let me browse through books on my own while they went off to choose books for themselves. I would lay books out on the table and if one of my friends happened to be there, we would look at them together. As it happens, I’ve come to think that this is one of the most important activities that parents and teachers can give to children. It enables us to find what we want to read. We do it by scanning many different kinds of texts, selecting and rejecting - each of these being as important as the other, and it implies in its practice that texts belong to the reader.
My brother and I got comics. I think I was most interested in my brother’s one which was called ‘The Eagle’ which was a mixture of British science fiction heroism - Dan Dare who battled the mighty Mekon and the Treens, comedy with a character called Harris Tweed, various kinds of information about wonderful British inventions, pets and good Christian deeds. He would read these to me and we talked about them.
Somewhere around this time, my best friend and I discovered ‘Winnie the Pooh’. His father was a painter and decorator, his mother what we used to call the ‘lollypop lady’ - that’s to say she helped children cross the road on the way to and from school. I have a strong memory of walking down the street, chanting some of ‘Pooh’s Hums’ especially the one about his nose being cold. I can also remember talking with him about the Hefferlump episode and laughing as we tried to explain to each other the absurdity of the story. I can see now that we were trying to get to grips with dramatic irony - that we knew more about what was going on than the protagonists.
At school, we were read to at the end of every day. The first of these that I distinctly remember was ‘Emil and the Detectives’ and the one I was most enthusiastic about was ‘Hue and Cry’ a novelisation of the film of the same title. Our headteacher read to us once a week on a Friday. He would read a chapter and then snap the book shut. We would shout out, how cruel this was, and how he should read it to us more often. We tried to get a copy of the book from the library but he seemed to have the world’s only copy of it. More important than I can explain, we would talk about the book in the time between the Friday readings. This is a great example of the social production of meaning - something that Dickens is celebrated for. That’s to say, meaning of text is not something produced in some kind of private, isolated, individual way. Meaning comes out of social interaction. On the playground we played out ‘Hue and Cry’ which incidentally has strong links to ‘Emil and the Detectives’.
There was a good deal of learning of hymns, carols and songs at school right from the first years. We had song-books, hymn-books and carol sheets. We got these through music lessons, morning assemblies, hymn-practice, carol concerts, and what used to be called RI - religious instruction. This was a text-heavy experience, with hundreds of words that I, for one, didn’t really understand. The music often - not always - carried the boredom of not knowing what I was saying. I can remember asking what was the meaning of: ‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall’ . I said, that hills don’t have walls. It was a good example of being able to read without understanding what I was reading. Not in itself particularly bad - it was part of the textual variety that we were offered. We recited prayers every day - the Lord’s Prayer and one other. I had no idea what the Lord’s Prayer meant - again, in itself no bad thing necessarily.
We also recited poems. At the age of 7 - I can remember the teacher - we were asked to perform poems. One boy learned his off by heart - ‘Autumn Fires’ - but the rest of us read ours ‘with good expression’. I think I read ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ and everyone laughed at the phrase ‘greasy Joan’ because there was a girl in our class called Joan.
When I was a little bit older I was in the Choral Speaking group - other children were in the Choir or other groups. We recited ‘Adlestrop’. There was a good deal of discussion about whether ‘unwontedly’ meant not wanted. We were told by Mrs MacNab that it did not but at the end of the discussion I still thought that it kind of did.
By this time, I was reading historical fiction by authors like Geoffrey Trease - who was a kind of compulsory curriculum for Left wing parents, Rosemary Sutcliff, Henry Treece, Cynthia Harnett, - animal novels by people like a French author called Rene Guillot, a Canadian author Ernest Thompson Seton, others like ‘Raff the Jungle Bird’ - a story that obsessed me about two New York naturalists who looked after a mynah bird.
These two tastes came out of what my parents had read to me but I have the memory of hunting down books and authors by myself, asking in the library, for example, if they had any more by, say, Rene Guillot or Ernest Thompson Seton who weren’t published by Puffin books.
When I was 10 my father brought back from a conference a book called ‘There’s no Escape’ by Ian Serraillier which Serraillier signed ‘For your ten year old’ . I thought that there was something magical about the author of a book signing it and I badgered my father to tell me about what he looked like. I still have the book.
Throughout this time, I was also reading what I was writing. Surely, one route to being able to read, understanding what we read, is to write things that we say? If, there are things we say but can’t write, again, surely it’s wonderful that there are people who can do it for us? I have no memory of this being done at school - it may well have been though - but my mother did plenty of it. She did it two ways: she wrote down things we said and showed us. Also, she had trained to be what used to be called a ‘shorthand typist’ and would type things that we said to her and we would read them together.
From November 4th, 1952, I still have what we would now call a ‘trail’. It’s ‘My Visit to the Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road, E2’. I was 6. remember the visit. I went with just my father who would have been 33 at the time. I filled in the sections with him, ‘Christopher Wren was a....‘famous architect’ who lived in the....‘17th 18th’ century. Under ‘Find the names of four people living now who are hleping to make the world a better place to live in, I have written 1. Harry Pollitt - who at the time was General Secretary of the Communist Party. I have a memory of my father laughing that I had written that.
After the trip, we came out to the bus stop and my father pointed over the road and said, ‘Look, there’s your shop’. I looked and the shop was called ‘M.Rosen’ written in large red letters on a white background. I had always had a sense that hardly anyone was called Rosen and certainly there were no other M.Rosens in my world. Now here was a shop with my name on it. It was again magical that just a few letters could have such a powerful effect.
At school, a group of us asked if we could make a class magazine and we made it, duplicated it on a Gestetner and sold it for school funds. We each wrote articles, jokes and puzzles.
In sum, put together all these activities together, say between the time I was born and the age of 10 - and they made me a reader. I understand that by saying that, I have said something controversial. Someone - let’s call him Dave - showed a conference how the children at his school learned how to read. They learned to read doing SSF, he said. He showed us his timetable and it included, I think, about an hour a day, right from the very start, a lot of story-telling, singing, listening to poetry, learning it, listening to teachers reading stories. I made the fatal error of saying that this was also teaching the children how to read. He got very angry with me and said that it didn’t.
So, let’s forget for a moment what this hour a day of story-telling and poetry is called, why did they do it? What was the purpose of it? Dave’s not here to answer that question, so I’m going to give it a go. Quite apart from the fun and delight that I hope was going on the room doing songs, poems and stories, quite apart from whatever these songs, poems and stories say about personal and social experience, hopes, desires, fears, loves, hates and the rest, presumably something else was going on. The children were hearing language used in ways that by and large they wouldn’t hear or use themselves. Just to be clear, this is not because they are backward, benighted, underprivileged children, in the words of West Side Story, ‘depraved on account of being deprived’. No, simply because most written texts are organised in ways that are not the same as the way we speak and talk. We all speak in what have been called ‘minor sentences’, ‘fragments’ with ‘ellipses’, corrections, repetitions, fade-outs, self-interruptions or interruptions from others, speech with visual cues - gestures, facial expressions, speech with expressions which can indicate the exact opposite of what the word apparently means as with, famously, ‘Yeah right’ and ‘Yeah, right’. Speech often relies on pronouns which do not specify each time who the person is talking about.
The literature and non-fiction that was going on in Dave’s school, as he described it, would have been made up of continuous prose, interspersed sometimes with the constructed dialogue of stories and novels. And it would also have included the strange, specialised language of poetry, which is often a thing unto itself, but also picks up on language from a wide range of sources as its raw material.
If we think that learning to read can be expressed in the phrase ‘learning to read with understanding’ then this hearing and acting out of the written word, is part of how we learn to read with understanding. We get how the complicated systems of the written language work. We get how to derive meaning from these systems. We learn that learning how to read with understanding is not a matter of reading letters or not even a matter of reading words. And this is where the arguments can get the fiercest. Reading with understanding involves getting the units of meaning across several or many words, linked as they are by the grammar of the language.
We learn the grammar of the spoken language by hearing and using it thousands of times. One of the key ways to learn the grammar of the written language is to hear it and use it thousands of times. The most pleasurable ways to do that is to be read to, to learn songs, poems and plays that please us and to have what we say scribed for us so that we can read it back.
Dave must have known that. He proudly showed us authors visiting his school, who as far as we could see, were also teaching the children to read as they read their works to the children and followed it up by doing writing workshops with the children, where the children read what they wrote.
I’m not one of those authors - at Dave’s school but it is what I do. I go into schools, I do poems that the children can read for themselves as they are in books. I have put performances of my poems - by me - up on my website so that children can see them over and over again and, as I’ve discovered, learn them without having to learn them.
I hope that many children get to make the connection between the language coming out of my mouth in these performances, the language that they can find on the page, and language that they themselves can write and say.
It’s a very simple circle writing, reading, performing (or call it reading out loud) , writing, reading, performing but, sadly, not one that is necessarily or universally given emphasis. I’ll give an example.
Last year, some musicians and I put together a show called ‘Centrally Heated Knickers’. It was based on a book of poems of the same name that I wrote several years ago. All 100 poems have a link to science, technology and design. It was a commission from the Design Council with co-operation from the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry. We had several meetings where I met the scientists and we discussed whether the poems did or did not open up questions about science and its application in the world around us. In the book, the links between the poems and science are mentioned in the headings and the Association of Science in Education produced a lengthy book with links between the poems, the science in question and what they called ‘literacy’.
The show was a piece of theatre involving me performing the poems, along with a sax player, a guitarist and percussionist who played drums and vibes. A dance and mime artist acted out the poems or choreographed them. We focussed on the poems that were linked to the production and reception of sound and in the middle of the show there was a partly improvised section where I played the scientist demonstrating a machine called the ‘earstument’ which was a mock up of a cross-section of the ear.
At most of the venues we did the show, there were copies of ‘Centrally Heated Knickers’ on sale. Sometimes, I went out to front of house to sign copies. Most of the shows were daytime ones for schools, some though were at the weekends for families.
Now, I don’t know how the adults at these shows conceive of reading and literacy - and for me to talk about this particular show is a matter loaded with my own bias. But, put it this way, when I’ve taken my children to shows, I’ve very consciously thought of ways in which the show can have an afterlife - in part, through text. It may well have an afterlife in, say, putting on shows, dancing or singing or whatever...but I’ve always thought that if we want to make texts as texts matter, then we have to grab every possible link with occasions that are fun, exciting or interesting to that child.
So, if we go to the Tower of London, we go to the shop and whatever things the children buy, I will get some piece of written material that links to it and that will lie about in the house following the visit. I can remember going with my oldest child to see David Wood’s play and his own direction of ‘The Gingerbread Man’ . On the way out there were copies of the play and a cassette tape of the show. Surely here was a perfect way to make a link between the show that Joe had enjoyed, the songs and the dialogue.
So, there am I, sitting in the foyer of a theatre, having done a show that the children have joined in with. As they go out, some of the adults seem to know exactly the fun and worth of making a link between what the children have just seen and heard and the words on a page. We have conversations about that as I sign the books. I see parents or teachers opening the book straightaway and saying things like - and here’s ‘Boogy Woogy Buggy’. They make the connection between what for a young children possibly looks like instant invention - Michael Rosen plus a jazz group - doing a performance - and here laid out on the page - again, as if by magic - is the frozen representation of that performance, the poem in a book. Alongside some other poems that Michael Rosen didn’t perform, and some that he did, and some that are very similar but in some key ways are different.
I’m not surprised that some parents might not know how useful it would be to make the link between the live word of a show and the frozen words on the page. Many have come to believe that the best ways to get their children to be literate is to buy those grammar and spelling booklets on sale in newsagents. The daft thing is that the jokes and puzzles in comics often did the same thing but in fun, sharing ways that we could enjoy together.
In the case of the teachers, I think it’s a matter of how, in the last ten years, the different sides of reading, writing, performing (or saying out loud) have been separated off. So, the occasion of the visit to see Centrally Heated Knickers was for some of the teachers, clearly in the category of ‘seeing a show’ and had no direct or explicit connection to, say, reading or writing.
As I sat there, I found myself wondering, what other ways are there of interesting or exciting children in the written language? There are of course many and I just hope that the schools in question did these. I fear, and of course I can’t prove it that the schools weren’t like the one the poet Andrew Fusek Peters wrote about on facebook recently. He recounted that he had performed his poems in a school and did writing workshops with the children. He had brought some of his books to the school and asked the headteacher if he wanted any. The head replied, no, as they had spent all their money or a new reading scheme.
So, though the school had spent money on inviting a poet in. Though the poet had entertained the children - knowing Andrew’s work - they would have joined in and participated in the performance - though they would have written and read things out loud, one part of the circle would have been missing - namely that no child in the school would have been able to make a link between what Andrew said and what might appear on a page.
In case this sounds what in Yiddish is called ‘kvetsh’ - a moan or whinge on behalf of we poor poets, I think we do have a serious question here about how we initiate and - just as importantly - carry on an interest in written language.
It is clearly not sufficient to announce that this or that child or school student is proficient in reading. If we are interested in education of the whole child, we have to be interested in whether the child or student is intrigued and delighted by written things.
Maybe in the future we will encode our most precious, powerful, wise and indeed most evil ideas - in forms other than the written language. We do a lot already of course via radio, TV and film and the digital platforms now available to us through PCs, laptops, tablets and phones, These are all highly oral and visual forms. However, those that have the power or wealth to produce these forms, actually encode nearly all of them in their first stages through the written word. So there is an irony going on here in that we the masses imbibe this stuff orally and visually while those that produce it do, more often than not, do it through the literacy of scripts, written offers to producers and the whole thing is surrounded by blurbs, puffs, crits, contracts, law cases, articles in magazines and newspapers, text-rich websites.
Meanwhile, powerful ideas - whether those of power or those who wish to critique that power - are still largely expressed through the written word whether that be in traditional forms of newspapers, books and magazines, or in online blogs, twitter, facebook, online newspapers, websites.
I’m not sure that what goes by the name of literacy in schools is universally keeping up with this. In one school, I’ll see children blogging their stories or accounts of the trip to Kew Gardens to schools in the USA or Australia. In another school, I’ll see children writing their stories and accounts in their exercise books, where they get marked and forgotten. In one school, I’ll see children making performances out of songs and poems - partly written by themselves, partly written by teachers, partly written by published authors. In another school, I’ll gather that children hardly do any of this because it’s not ‘literacy’. Literacy in some cases is doing literacy exercises and only literacy exercises because the exercises are good rehearsals for the literacy tests.
Just to be clear, I am not blaming or even criticising those teachers and those schools which do this. In a system which is centrally controlled through the tests, league tables and inspection systems, schools will do whatever they think is the best way to get through the hoops. If dry runs of high-stakes testing appears to get the least able through the tests, they will do it. If the same authorities then blame them for teaching to the test, they’ll take the insult and carry on so that their school doesn’t get closed or turned into something else that no one in that school’s community asked for.
Of course, I - and I suspect most people here - will try to say that exciting children to be interested in reading and writing has to be a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional process in which we look out of hooks to catch different children in different ways. One child gets hooked on comics and graphic novels - as three of my children have. Another one gets hooked on fairy books - one of my children. Another one on poetry - as none of my children have. Another one on song and performance - as I did. Another one on puzzles and science - as my brother did. For some, it might be the fact that that child has a younger brother, sister, cousin or neighbour who wants to be entertained...as in the tweet I mentioned at the very beginning.
So, I’ll mention one other powerful motor in my life that has affected me since my childhood. My brother discovered the Molesworth books. These take place in a Hogwarts sort of a place - a private school, called St Custards, where Molesworth a thirteen or fourteen year old has sussed what’s going on, the corruption, the senseless testing, the overblown rhetoric. The school itself was absolutely nothing like my primary school, though some of it could be related to the grammar school that my brother went to and where I would go a few years later.
Over a long period my brother read the Molesworth books to me. They are written in non-correct English as if Molesworth, who tells the stories, is only semi-literate. He read these to me many, many times. We sometimes sat next to each other laughing at the spelling, marvelling at Ronald Searle’s drawings and caricatures. Sometimes we would weep with laughter at these books. Eventually, we would be able to quote whole sections at each other and expressions from the books started turning up in our speech, and in our letters to each other if were apart - on holiday or whatever.
Nearly 60 years later, we’re still doing it.
Most people in this room, I suspect might be able to point to analogous activities to do with comics, songs, poems, theatre clubs, where the social activity drove the attachment to this or that text or part of a text. Sometimes it’s only intermittent or fragmentary. In my case I’m lucky enough to say that it intense, frequent and repeated. As it happens, in my case, it went on at home.
But I’ve been to schools where it goes on through stories, poems, songs, plays, pantomimes and whole school projects on, say, ‘The Tempest’. This calls for teachers, children, parents and school-workers to co-operate on a huge joint enterprise. In the process and the evaluation, teachers find out areas of practise not covered by words like ‘lesson’ or ‘assessment’ but which nevertheless have everything to do with - for want of a better word - literacy.
In the last school I was in, where the school were embarking on whole school project about Noah and the flood, I got into a conversation with a teacher about how the children could each contribute to a narrative performance poem about the flood, whilst at the same time putting in solo pieces written and performed by the animals, Noah’s family along with choruses from, say, the rain, the clouds, the sky, God, the water, the ark. ‘I am king of the clouds’ wrote one boy. The rain chorus warned that they would rain and rain and never stop. God said that nothing frightened him, nothing at all. I showed them that simply by repeating a word or phrase you set up a rhythm. I had a conversation with a teacher saying that repetition is the basis of most poetry, whether that’s through meter, rhyme, alliteration or patterns of images, even opposites and contrasts are a form of repetition. All the teachers and all the children were active planners in the devising of the texts and performances of the show.
[I think I made some ad-lib comments to conclude but I'm afraid I don't have a record of them…]
Saturday 24 January 2015
Protocol with Abdullah funeral is just 'our national interest'
Let's remember our leaders' 'protocol' of attending King Abdullah's funeral and flying the union flag at half-mast, when our leaders tell us next time what's wrong with one kind of country that happens to be their target at the time (Iran, North Korea, Cuba etc). In other words, we really have to remember that all our leaders' statements about what's right and wrong are really comments about political expediency. So when they say they are against 'beheadings', say, they really mean that they are against the beheadings they don't like, but they'll put up with beheadings in a country which is in our "national interest" to support. Same goes for "human rights" or "freedom" and all the other things they pretend are absolutes, and bottom-line things.
In fact, for them, it's all relative, all contingent on their alliances, which are in turn means by which they try to get advantage over other countries in a world based on competition. A world based on competition is in reality a slavery contest: who can enslave the masses the best i.e. who can employ the majority in their respective countries at the lowest level of payment.
Wednesday 21 January 2015
"It'll be a disaster!"
At least three times on this morning's Today programme I heard a mixture of BBC commentators and experts' telling us that if Greece votes for Syriza it'll be a 'disaster'!
If we unpack this, we get to who and what an 'economist' is and what they say and what politicians say and what commentators say is, and is not, a 'disaster'. So:
A massive cut in the standard of living for millions of people is NOT a disaster.
A massive cut in the standard of welfare available to millions of people is NOT a disaster.
Any threat to mega-rich people getting repayments on their loans or bonds WOULD BE a disaster.
A 'strong' economy can be an economy in which poor people are getting poorer and rich people getting richer.
A 'strong' economy can be called a 'recovery' even as the mass of the population are experiencing a cut in wages, and cuts in public services.
This is the bullshit we have to put up with every day, every hour in the press, on the radio and on TV.
Monday 19 January 2015
Two speeches: May and Pickles
Two speeches over the weekend: May and Pickles. The first, bending over backwards to show that the government took seriously the danger being faced by Jews; the second, suggesting that the 'loyalty' of all British Muslims was in doubt.
So, the two key words here are 'danger' and 'loyalty'. What could possibly be wrong? Well, what if, for a moment we asked, What would happen if we questioned the loyalty of Jews and then raised the question of danger to Muslims. Would that be justified in any way?
Well, the loyalty matter raises the question of the relation between Jews and a foreign power - Israel. You could make a case for saying that many Jews have a dual loyalty - to the country they live in AND Israel. Zionists will always say that this should never be described as a disloyalty to the country that Jews find themselves in and it's anti-semitic to say that it is disloyal. And yet we had the scene of Netanyahu pleading with French Jews to emigrate to Israel. What could be more 'disloyal' than emigrating? Already, the conversation in the newspaper columns discusses similar matters here. Will those talking about emigration be described as 'disloyal'? Of course not.
Nor will the questions of loyalty to a state that by all accounts (not just leftwing, anti-zionist, pro-Palestinian ones) went into Gaza and was 'disproportionate' in its treatment of the Gaza people. That is it killed hundreds of people who were in no way involved in the attacks on Israel. So, aren't there 'dangers' here that many Jews in Britain, fail to detach themselves from these acts of violence? Or indeed that there is a vocal minority who demonstrate on the streets supporting those acts of violence?
Now, let's flip over to the Muslim community: haven't they been on the receiving end of attacks and racism directed towards them? Aren't they in danger - as indeed Jews are? Haven't marches been carried out through their areas by racist groups (or attempted marches) precisely in order to threaten them - and indeed off the backs of these, haven't there been attacks, and killings?
So, two speeches, designed, I suspect, with the deliberate intention of creating and/or cementing differences, suspicions between two minorities. I would hope that leaders of either community will be able to see through this, see the dangers and point out just how nasty this move is. Sad to say Jonathan Sacks (ex-Chief Rabbi) was on BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning and he took the opportunity to point out how superior the Jews had been in training their rabbis to be loyal. Not much unity there then.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/19/uk-muslim-council-objections-eric-pickles-letter
Monday 12 January 2015
"Dear Mr Netanyahu"….
This was posted on one of my threads by Ray Sirotkin:
"Dear Mr Netanyahu,
Thank you for the invitation to live in Israel, a right I have had since birth in London, but a right not afforded to Palestinian people who were born inside Israel.
I have lived in Britain during my lifetime and am happy to live in France. I know they are both imperialist countries and have a lot to learn about how to treat immigrants, black people and indeed Jews.
As a Jew, what is nice about living in these two imperfect countries is that I can rent or buy a house without turning families off their land and I do not feel like a settler, but simply an equal.I don't know whether I can expect to live long enough till the day
comes when Palestinians are treated as well as I am in Britain or France by friends who are Jewish, black, white, Muslim or simply British or French. I do know that i wouldn't entertain the idea of being in Israel until Israel embarks on a course of establishing equality for all who live there and in the occupied territories."
Monday morning in Bletchley-like Intelligence bunker...
Monday morning in Bletchley-like Intelligence bunker. Around a large table sits a group of Oxford educated men in their forties and fifties. A senior-looking figure speaks:
'Morning chaps, first off, I think yesterday was a great success. There were some excellent photo ops and we were looking good. But must move on. Let's do some blue sky envelope pushing and ask the biggie: Why do these men take up arms and shoot people? Straight off, can we rule out stuff that we can't do anything about - so if you come back at me and say some rot about 'wars' - I'll say to you, 'not our department'. If you say, 'oh these young men have very little chance to do anything worthwhile or make their lives feel better unless they can win the lottery, sell drugs, take drugs or rob a bank, I'll say to you, 'not our department'.
So moving on, what have we got? Islam - good. Anything else? Freedom. Yes, good. They don't like freedom. Very good. Islam and freedom-no-likey. We're building the picture. Ah - yes, Jolyon, interesting point about our chaps supporting this or that side out there in the desert. Do you follow horses, Jolyon? You see it's no use telling a betting man to stay away from the races, is it? That's what we do. We go in there and back winners and losers. One day your horse comes in, next time he runs he flops. That's what it's like out there. But either way, it's nothing to do with what we're talking about here. Even if it was, there's nothing we can do about it. It's another department. And just because some of the loot finds its way into these jonnies' hands is neither here nor there….
So, look, we've got to pull some threads together here - we've got to defend freedom - check. We've got to watch out for Islam - check. We've got to support Number 10 in what they do. OK, off you go and, mind the step on the way out. "
'Morning chaps, first off, I think yesterday was a great success. There were some excellent photo ops and we were looking good. But must move on. Let's do some blue sky envelope pushing and ask the biggie: Why do these men take up arms and shoot people? Straight off, can we rule out stuff that we can't do anything about - so if you come back at me and say some rot about 'wars' - I'll say to you, 'not our department'. If you say, 'oh these young men have very little chance to do anything worthwhile or make their lives feel better unless they can win the lottery, sell drugs, take drugs or rob a bank, I'll say to you, 'not our department'.
So moving on, what have we got? Islam - good. Anything else? Freedom. Yes, good. They don't like freedom. Very good. Islam and freedom-no-likey. We're building the picture. Ah - yes, Jolyon, interesting point about our chaps supporting this or that side out there in the desert. Do you follow horses, Jolyon? You see it's no use telling a betting man to stay away from the races, is it? That's what we do. We go in there and back winners and losers. One day your horse comes in, next time he runs he flops. That's what it's like out there. But either way, it's nothing to do with what we're talking about here. Even if it was, there's nothing we can do about it. It's another department. And just because some of the loot finds its way into these jonnies' hands is neither here nor there….
So, look, we've got to pull some threads together here - we've got to defend freedom - check. We've got to watch out for Islam - check. We've got to support Number 10 in what they do. OK, off you go and, mind the step on the way out. "
Sunday 11 January 2015
Republican values, Zola, Jews, Muslims...
We'll hear a lot today about 'Republican values'. It's not a phrase that means very much in the British context as it represents a line that stretches from the French Revolution to now, skittering around such events as the Napoleonic reformation of France, the 1848 revolution, the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, the secularisation of the state, the Popular Front government, Vichy France and the Resistance, wars in Indochina and Algeria, and the recent laws against 'the veil' - and much, much more.
There really is no direct equivalent in Britain. Quite apart from the fact that we still have a monarchy, a House of Lords, an established church and state funded faith schools and Christian worship in state non-faith schools, all the bourgeois values espoused by the state are spread across many documents, laws and interpretations of laws.
As a phrase used in France, it cuts in several ways. To take some examples: even as Emile Zola took up the principled - and extremely dangerous - stance of defending Dreyfus as a defence of republican values, he was writing a piece of fiction which suggested that it was the utopian job of republican France to civilise Africans with these values in the French empire. Or, again, at ceremonies at monuments which commemorate the deaths of members of the Resistance, speeches are made which demand a return to the values of the Resistance and to the Republican values of peace, justice, anti-racism, anti-discrimination. They often give these speeches surrounded by veterans holding the French flag inscribed with the words Indochina and Algeria.
Some on the left say that it would be better to junk the phraseology of 'Republican values' - it's been too tarnished by all this. Some say just the opposite. It's important to reclaim it, restate it, seek out its origins, quote the words and deeds of heroes who defended the core or original values involved - which is where Zola comes in.
I've only recently come to fully understand the nature of the rage and hate that he confronted when he chose to defend Dreyfus. It entailed opposing the state, the army, the monarchist faction and a large part of the Catholic church. But more than that, it meant opposing a fanatical, abusive, massively popular faction which self-described as 'anti-semitic'. The faction was so voluble and popular that many parts of the state and the army absorbed it and embraced it. Zola was almost alone as a non-Jew to write against this faction, against this anti-semitism, and, though of course he had supporters, he was the one to face up to the consequences of saying this by being taken to court and sentenced. Of course this is not to detract from the pain experienced by Dreyfus and his family. I'm talking about something different here: the defence made by someone not belonging to the persecuted minority Dreyfus belonged to. And, as it happens, it came from someone who had made his main job, writing fiction. Zola didn't need to get in there and do what he did. But he did. On that account: legend, hero. Those in France who think it's their republican duty to mock and vilify Muslims might find a word or two in Zola's defences of a minority, how shall I put it…. interesting, or relevant. In fact, much of what the anti-semitic faction said then about 'the Jews' is said today about 'the Muslims'.
Plus ça change….
(None of these words should be taken to justify or condone the murders.)
There really is no direct equivalent in Britain. Quite apart from the fact that we still have a monarchy, a House of Lords, an established church and state funded faith schools and Christian worship in state non-faith schools, all the bourgeois values espoused by the state are spread across many documents, laws and interpretations of laws.
As a phrase used in France, it cuts in several ways. To take some examples: even as Emile Zola took up the principled - and extremely dangerous - stance of defending Dreyfus as a defence of republican values, he was writing a piece of fiction which suggested that it was the utopian job of republican France to civilise Africans with these values in the French empire. Or, again, at ceremonies at monuments which commemorate the deaths of members of the Resistance, speeches are made which demand a return to the values of the Resistance and to the Republican values of peace, justice, anti-racism, anti-discrimination. They often give these speeches surrounded by veterans holding the French flag inscribed with the words Indochina and Algeria.
Some on the left say that it would be better to junk the phraseology of 'Republican values' - it's been too tarnished by all this. Some say just the opposite. It's important to reclaim it, restate it, seek out its origins, quote the words and deeds of heroes who defended the core or original values involved - which is where Zola comes in.
I've only recently come to fully understand the nature of the rage and hate that he confronted when he chose to defend Dreyfus. It entailed opposing the state, the army, the monarchist faction and a large part of the Catholic church. But more than that, it meant opposing a fanatical, abusive, massively popular faction which self-described as 'anti-semitic'. The faction was so voluble and popular that many parts of the state and the army absorbed it and embraced it. Zola was almost alone as a non-Jew to write against this faction, against this anti-semitism, and, though of course he had supporters, he was the one to face up to the consequences of saying this by being taken to court and sentenced. Of course this is not to detract from the pain experienced by Dreyfus and his family. I'm talking about something different here: the defence made by someone not belonging to the persecuted minority Dreyfus belonged to. And, as it happens, it came from someone who had made his main job, writing fiction. Zola didn't need to get in there and do what he did. But he did. On that account: legend, hero. Those in France who think it's their republican duty to mock and vilify Muslims might find a word or two in Zola's defences of a minority, how shall I put it…. interesting, or relevant. In fact, much of what the anti-semitic faction said then about 'the Jews' is said today about 'the Muslims'.
Plus ça change….
(None of these words should be taken to justify or condone the murders.)
Today in Paris
There will be hundreds of thousands of good people demonstrating in Paris today, people who believe in an open, free society, who oppose the murder of people for writing or drawing, who oppose the murder of people because they are Jews. However, at the front of the demonstration, the ones most quoted will be leaders who have waged wars that have killed tens of thousands of innocent people, who have enacted laws which discriminate against minorities in their countries, who have tried to ride the anti-immigrant tiger, who have eagerly waged economic war on the poorest people in their countries, and who create alliances with the very regimes who sustain and support the assassins.
If I was in Paris, I would feel uncomfortable - to say the least - feeling that I was marching 'behind' or 'with' such people. Perhaps, physically, actually in the streets it will feel different - that there are two demonstrations - the leaders' one where these rulers wrap themselves in flags hoping that their show of care and sympathy will make them look dignified and honest, and a people's one where they can show solidarity and sadness about citizens like themselves being killed or the free circulation of ideas being stifled.
One particular piece of dishonesty that seems likely to unfold today is the presence of the leader of Israel. Quite apart from his recent record of sending in troops who killed hundreds of civilians, he is there in order to recruit Jews to emigrate to Israel whilst preventing Palestinians from returning to where they came from. All this can only happen through further dispossession of homes and land of the Palestinians. Nothing he says or does today will help make anything better in France.
I suspect that the press will be full of the suggestion the presence of these leaders will be like some great soothing ointment bathing the pustules of bitterness. It's what the press calls 'solidarity'. We will need other kinds of solidarity to arrive at a society that has real liberty, equality and fraternity for all. There will be hardly one leader on show today who really believes in those words. That's the problem.
If I was in Paris, I would feel uncomfortable - to say the least - feeling that I was marching 'behind' or 'with' such people. Perhaps, physically, actually in the streets it will feel different - that there are two demonstrations - the leaders' one where these rulers wrap themselves in flags hoping that their show of care and sympathy will make them look dignified and honest, and a people's one where they can show solidarity and sadness about citizens like themselves being killed or the free circulation of ideas being stifled.
One particular piece of dishonesty that seems likely to unfold today is the presence of the leader of Israel. Quite apart from his recent record of sending in troops who killed hundreds of civilians, he is there in order to recruit Jews to emigrate to Israel whilst preventing Palestinians from returning to where they came from. All this can only happen through further dispossession of homes and land of the Palestinians. Nothing he says or does today will help make anything better in France.
I suspect that the press will be full of the suggestion the presence of these leaders will be like some great soothing ointment bathing the pustules of bitterness. It's what the press calls 'solidarity'. We will need other kinds of solidarity to arrive at a society that has real liberty, equality and fraternity for all. There will be hardly one leader on show today who really believes in those words. That's the problem.
Friday 9 January 2015
I watched the Guardian live streaming a discussion about Charlie Hebdo...
I watched the Guardian live streaming of a discussion-debate about Charlie Hebdo last night. There's an interesting moment when a woman who said that one of her parents is Algerian tried to describe the relationship between Algerians and France. She said how people remembered how the police killed Algerians demonstrating in Paris in 1961 and how it took over 40 years to get any justice about this. Nick Cohen replied to this by saying that this was something that people didn't know about and couldn't have been a factor in what happened at Charlie Hebdo. (apologies if I've misremembered something here, but that's how I understood this interchange).
Several thoughts here - assuming that I've got it right about what was said: Cohen either doesn't know, or pretends he doesn't know how collective consciousness stays with people. This is acknowledged and encouraged in official versions of culture, where anything from royalty to Hovis is recycled for our consumption in the official media. Meanwhile, people have unofficial, subversive, resistant cultural consciousness which may indeed go back decades. In the specific case of the Paris massacre of the Algerians, it's very much an episode that sits in my mind - a) because I was in Paris very soon after and remember police on the streets following passers by with machine guns in their hands b) I met Vidal Nacquet who was part of the 'Socialisme ou Barbarie' group and heard him talk about this event c) there is an appalling link between what happened on that day and how Vichy France collaborated with the deportation of Jews from France to Auschwitz - the chief of police on that day was Maurice Papon who was later convicted - much later, of collaborating with the deportation of more than a thousand Jews during WW2. He represents in France one of the most famous of collaborators who was able to achieve high office in post-war France.
I don't know how Algerians and people of Algerian origin remember all this. The woman in the audience suggested that it was something that her family remember and know about.
Meanwhile, no one thought that it was appropriate to ask Nick Cohen about the fact that he had made strenuous efforts in the past to support the UK govt's actions in Iraq - and has, as far as I know, never expressed any regrets about this. In fact, part of how Nick Cohen's views on Charlie Hebdo are concerned, is that he seems to want to keep the debate to a very narrow field: Islamists kill cartoonists - which would be OK if human beings were as one-dimensional as this. It seems as if, when awful murders take place, we are very good at shrinking and reducing people's motives down to short descriptions: psychopath, evil, crazy, Islamist etc. That might be OK for quick shorthand things we say to ourselves but surely it won't do by way of explanations.
However, I can see that there is a major obstacle to coming up with explanations. People immediately interpret them as 'justifications' or indeed that they are ways of 'condoning' what happened. (It's happened to me on fb in relation to what I've written). Just to be clear, I don't justify or condone what happened. I could have been on the 30 bus that was bombed in London, or on the tube. I could easily be in an office or building somewhere that a cell of armed men could decide is the enemy. To that extent, I am the same as the people killed. I am not going to justify or condone this. However, I think we need to look at how we are part of history, and indeed how these murders are part of a bigger, longer story.
I believe that we have all been dragged into a war. Not a WW2 type war but a war with many fronts, many sides, many methods which ruthlessly draws in civilians and kills them. The awful event in Paris has been repeated many times over by people acting in my name or acting in the name of the French people. I find it incredible to hear politicians who have sent troops and bombs into countries thousands of miles away, which kill thousands of people, asking us to weep for these deaths. Why the selectivity? Why is it important to them that we care for these deaths rather than the ones that they arrange for? Why are they so keen that we uncouple the deaths they have caused from the ones that happen here?
Thursday 8 January 2015
New poem: Street
I got caught in some traffic the other day. A car
had stopped up ahead. I thought that it had broken
down. People started getting out of their cars and
beeping their horns. Someone walking on the
pavement alongside me was pointing. I got out
and walked up the street. There was a car with no
driver in it, rin the middle of a single lane. The door
was open and a man was standing in front of a car
looking down at the road. He was shouting. As I got
nearer, I could see that he was staring at the sign on
the surface of the road where it said SLOW and he
was shouting, ‘I’m not, I’m not!’
The wars must go on...
How was it when you planned the first gulf war and the second and the
war in Afghanistan and the war in Libya? Did you sit in your bunkers
and convince yourselves that these were wars which would only be
fought where you were dropping bombs? Did you imagine that every time
an unarmed civilian died that this would be forgotten? Did you imagine
that every act of killing you took, was to defend us? Did anyone in the
bunker hold up his hand and say, 'Perhaps I should just raise the possibility
that people in the world who have links to the places we are bombing
will think that they can join the war by fighting it in our countries over here…'
Was he shouted down? Was he told that he was a wishy-washy liberal,
someone soft on multiculturalism, a relativist, a false witness, or what?
Was he told that he was a fool and didn't understand that these wars are
wars of known consequences and all these consequences are good ones:
peace, democracy, liberal values? These are wars to end wars. And he,
the foolish man, couldn't see that these were wars which would advance
civilisation. And if at any point in the future anyone were to raise the
possibility that attacks might be made on liberal western countries in
response to these wars, the foolish man would be told that there was no
linkage, no unforeseen consequences. The war must go on. The wars
must go on. And on. Civilisation is just round the corner. One last push.
One last drone. One last bomb. One last invasion. C'mon!
war in Afghanistan and the war in Libya? Did you sit in your bunkers
and convince yourselves that these were wars which would only be
fought where you were dropping bombs? Did you imagine that every time
an unarmed civilian died that this would be forgotten? Did you imagine
that every act of killing you took, was to defend us? Did anyone in the
bunker hold up his hand and say, 'Perhaps I should just raise the possibility
that people in the world who have links to the places we are bombing
will think that they can join the war by fighting it in our countries over here…'
Was he shouted down? Was he told that he was a wishy-washy liberal,
someone soft on multiculturalism, a relativist, a false witness, or what?
Was he told that he was a fool and didn't understand that these wars are
wars of known consequences and all these consequences are good ones:
peace, democracy, liberal values? These are wars to end wars. And he,
the foolish man, couldn't see that these were wars which would advance
civilisation. And if at any point in the future anyone were to raise the
possibility that attacks might be made on liberal western countries in
response to these wars, the foolish man would be told that there was no
linkage, no unforeseen consequences. The war must go on. The wars
must go on. And on. Civilisation is just round the corner. One last push.
One last drone. One last bomb. One last invasion. C'mon!
Wednesday 7 January 2015
Reading for pleasure and understanding - govt style.
Bearing in mind how hard-pressed teachers, writers, parents, children, students don't usually spend hours combing through documents on the Department for Education's website, I've copied up all the passages on 'Comprehension' for primary schools.
I'm doing this for several reasons. First of all, it's because people who work in schools often seem to find that they don't have room or time for many of the activities described below. So should any teacher, writer visiting schools, student or parent need back-up on why they are, let's say, relating children's experience to something they are reading, you can use this document to say that it's a legal requirement for you to do so.
Second reason - the past four years have involved a polarisation - in particular coming from the Sec of State about such things as 'the Blob', about the dangers of 'progressive methods' and so on. However, a close reading of what follows will find that a good deal of it contains what 'progressives' would claim as having come from the progressive school of learning and teaching. So, for people interested in the weird politics of all this, we can see that it's quite possible for two things to go on at the same time: a vilification of teachers, people, researchers, teaching methods and the like, even as the ideas from this school or camp (if that's what it is) are freely plundered and promoted!
Anyway here are the year by year statutory guidelines on 'Comprehension' for maintained primary schools in England - that's to say for schools 'maintained' by a Local Authority. This does NOT apply to Academies and Free Schools. They can choose to adopt these if they want to. Or not.
I hope that whoever you are you can use them and adapt them to help children enjoy books and reading.
retrieve and record information from non-fiction
participate in discussion about both books that are read to them and those they can read for themselves, taking turns and listening to what others say.
I'm doing this for several reasons. First of all, it's because people who work in schools often seem to find that they don't have room or time for many of the activities described below. So should any teacher, writer visiting schools, student or parent need back-up on why they are, let's say, relating children's experience to something they are reading, you can use this document to say that it's a legal requirement for you to do so.
Second reason - the past four years have involved a polarisation - in particular coming from the Sec of State about such things as 'the Blob', about the dangers of 'progressive methods' and so on. However, a close reading of what follows will find that a good deal of it contains what 'progressives' would claim as having come from the progressive school of learning and teaching. So, for people interested in the weird politics of all this, we can see that it's quite possible for two things to go on at the same time: a vilification of teachers, people, researchers, teaching methods and the like, even as the ideas from this school or camp (if that's what it is) are freely plundered and promoted!
Anyway here are the year by year statutory guidelines on 'Comprehension' for maintained primary schools in England - that's to say for schools 'maintained' by a Local Authority. This does NOT apply to Academies and Free Schools. They can choose to adopt these if they want to. Or not.
I hope that whoever you are you can use them and adapt them to help children enjoy books and reading.
Year 1
Pupils should be taught to:
- develop pleasure in reading, motivation to read, vocabulary and understanding by:
listening to and discussing a wide range of poems, stories and non-fiction at a level beyond that at which they can read independently
being encouraged to link what they read or hear to their own experiences
becoming very familiar with key stories, fairy stories and traditional tales, retelling them and considering their particular characteristics
recognising and joining in with predictable phrases
learning to appreciate rhymes and poems, and to recite some by heart
discussing word meanings, linking new meanings to those already known
- understand both the books they can already read accurately and fluently and those they listen to by:
drawing on what they already know or on background information and vocabulary provided by the teacher
checking that the text makes sense to them as they read, and correcting inaccurate reading
discussing the significance of the title and events
making inferences on the basis of what is being said and done
predicting what might happen on the basis of what has been read so far
- participate in discussion about what is read to them, taking turns and listening to what others say
- explain clearly their understanding of what is read to them
Year 2
Pupils should be taught to:
develop pleasure in reading, motivation to read, vocabulary and understanding by:
listening to, discussing and expressing views about a wide range of contemporary and classic poetry, stories and non-fiction at a level beyond that at which they can read independently
discussing the sequence of events in books and how items of information are related
becoming increasingly familiar with and retelling a wider range of stories, fairy stories and traditional tales
being introduced to non-fiction books that are structured in different ways
recognising simple recurring literary language in stories and poetry
discussing and clarifying the meanings of words, linking new meanings to known vocabulary
discussing their favourite words and phrases
continuing to build up a repertoire of poems learnt by heart, appreciating these
and reciting some, with appropriate intonation to make the meaning clear
and reciting some, with appropriate intonation to make the meaning clear
understand both the books that they can already read accurately and fluently and those that they listen to by:
drawing on what they already know or on background information and vocabulary provided by the teacher
checking that the text makes sense to them as they read and correcting inaccurate reading
making inferences on the basis of what is being said and done
answering and asking questions
predicting what might happen on the basis of what has been read so far
participate in discussion about books, poems and other works that are read to them and those that they can read for themselves, taking turns and listening to what others say
explain and discuss their understanding of books, poems and other material, both those that they listen to and those that they read for themselves.
Years 3 and 4
Pupils should be taught to:
develop positive attitudes to reading and understanding of what they read by:
develop positive attitudes to reading and understanding of what they read by:
listening to and discussing a wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks
reading books that are structured in different ways and reading for a range of purposes
using dictionaries to check the meaning of words that they have read
increasing their familiarity with a wide range of books, including fairy stories,
myths and legends, and retelling some of these orally
myths and legends, and retelling some of these orally
identifying themes and conventions in a wide range of books
* preparing poems and play scripts to read aloud and to perform, showing understanding through intonation, tone, volume and action
discussing words and phrases that capture the reader’s interest and imagination
recognising some different forms of poetry [for example, free verse, narrative poetry]
understand what they read, in books they can read independently, by:
understand what they read, in books they can read independently, by:
checking that the text makes sense to them, discussing their understanding and
explaining the meaning of words in context
explaining the meaning of words in context
asking questions to improve their understanding of a text
drawing inferences such as inferring characters’ feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions, and justifying inferences with evidence
predicting what might happen from details stated and implied
identifying main ideas drawn from more than one paragraph and summarising
these
these
identifying how language, structure, and presentation contribute to meaning
retrieve and record information from non-fiction
participate in discussion about both books that are read to them and those they can read for themselves, taking turns and listening to what others say.
Year 5 and 6
Pupils should be taught to:
maintain positive attitudes to reading and understanding of what they read by:
maintain positive attitudes to reading and understanding of what they read by:
continuing to read and discuss an increasingly wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks
reading books that are structured in different ways and reading for a range of purposes
increasing their familiarity with a wide range of books, including myths, legends and traditional stories, modern fiction, fiction from our literary heritage, and books from other cultures and traditions
recommending books that they have read to their peers, giving reasons for their choices
identifying and discussing themes and conventions in and across a wide range of writing
making comparisons within and across books
learning a wider range of poetry by heart
preparing poems and plays to read aloud and to perform, showing understanding through intonation, tone and volume so that the meaning is clear to an audience
understand what they read by:
checking that the book makes sense to them, discussing their understanding
and exploring the meaning of words in context
and exploring the meaning of words in context
asking questions to improve their understanding
drawing inferences such as inferring characters’ feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions, and justifying inferences with evidence
predicting what might happen from details stated and implied
summarising the main ideas drawn from more than one paragraph, identifying
key details that support the main ideas
key details that support the main ideas
identifying how language, structure and presentation contribute to meaning
discuss and evaluate how authors use language, including figurative language, considering the impact on the reader
distinguish between statements of fact and opinion
retrieve, record and present information from non-fiction
participate in discussions about books that are read to them and those they can read for themselves, building on their own and others’ ideas and challenging views courteously
explain and discuss their understanding of what they have read, including through formal presentations and debates, maintaining a focus on the topic and using notes where necessary
provide reasoned justifications for their views.