Hundreds of things to do with a poem

"I have become aware that many primary teachers do not enjoy poetry with their classes for the sheer visceral pleasure on a daily basis. Instead they 'study ' poems when poetry comes up in the cycle of genres ."

This is a comment from someone called Sandra Palmer who posted this on a thread on Facebook.

I wouldn't want to comment directly on this other than to say, please remember that poems were invented to do their own work. That's to say, poets write poems so that they will 'stick' or 'get under your skin' or 'affect us'. That's what I meant in a previous post about 'hooks'. The hooks that hook readers and listeners in are there. Poets spend their whole lives thinking of 'hooks', ways of interesting and intriguing readers and listeners. Of course, I have absolutely no objection to the study of these 'hooks' or any other part of poetry and literature for older school students and adults. The key thing for younger children - let's say primary age - is to engender enthusiasm, engagement, a spirit of curiosity and invention. The very best and easiest way of doing this is to expose the children to poetry. All you have to do is keep reading and sharing the stuff. Trust the poems, trust the poets. They did the stuff to make it work. If it doesn't work, leave it and find another one.

There are many ways of sharing it and if we spent as much time thinking about the many ways of sharing, as we are required to do in asking naff questions about it, we would have millions more people interested in and enjoying poetry.

We used to talk about 'Things to do with a poem'. You can find lists of them online. Only one of them, is to ask SATs-type questions about it. There are probably something like a hundred others. If you can bear to wait till October (!) I have assembled quite a few and put them in a book coming out then.

Think, poetry shows, film, dance, poster, mime, cabaret, poetry and jazz, self-made anthologies, poetry book corner, reading and daydreaming, wall displays, blogs, school bulletins, slams, powerpoint etc etc

One teacher I worked with simply started reading poems to the class before playtimes and before the end of the day. She didn't 'teach' poetry at all. As a result the children wanted more and more, she brought in more and more poetry books. The children borrowed the books, read the books in free reading time, started writing poems, bringing poems from home. She started 'publishing' their poems by putting them up on the walls in the room. And it all started from her simply reading poems to the class and being prepared - of course - to listen to what the children wanted and acting on it.

Dogs must be carried

Hundreds of thousands of children travel on the London Underground. When they do, they see hundreds of posters and notices. Many of the children I see, try to read these posters and  notices. Many of the notices and posters do not obey the so-called 'rules' that have to be taught in school, many of them show varieties of written English that reveal interesting and inventive forms of English.

Today, I was thinking about 'commands'. In real life, we have a range of means of commanding and requesting and inviting people to do things. This is a 'social' way of viewing language according to meaning and function. We might add in there, the factor of 'effect' and whether this or that form of language does or does not tend to produce or not produce its intended effect. The kind of grammar that children in primary schools have to learn is not very interested in any of this. It starts out from being interested in meaning and then categorizes language according to its structures. It is not interested in social function (which I would argue is its true meaning) nor its effect.

So, though we use the word 'command' in every day life to mean any structure of language which commands or demands or orders you to do something, primary school grammar takes that word 'command' and uses it for one very specific structure. Really, it's not 'command' but 'what we say is a "command"'. And 'what we say is a "command"' is the 'imperative form of the verb. We all know what this is, without necessarily knowing its name. You can hear two year olds bossing their toys around using it: 'Sit down!', 'Get up!'. In English - ignore other languages for the moment - the form of the verb used for this 'imperative' is nearly always the same one as the name of the verb, which we know with the 'to-' phrase: 'to sit down', 'to get up'. You can try it. Ask yourself, what is the imperative of the verb 'to eat'? It's 'Eat!'. What's the imperative of the verb 'to grow'? 'Grow!' Then you can have some fun thinking up some verbs where it would be ludicrous to have an imperative, though theoretically in some weird land inhabited by poets and novelists they could exist, like, say, 'to internalise' 'Internalise!' Then again, some verbs are what are called 'defective' because they can only be used in some structures and not in others. So there is no 'to must' or 'to would' and no imperative 'Must!' or 'Would!' though someone like Douglas Adams could have found a way to invent one, I'm sure. And hurrah for that.

Back with the social functioning of commands: in the London Underground there is a sign which Transport for London put up at the beginning of the escalator. This is what it says:

Please stand
on the right

Hold the
handrail
Keep clear
of the edges

Take extra
care with
children

Dogs must
be carried

No smoking

(Note first that there are no full stops or exclamation marks here. If you don't note it, rest assured that some children will. This tells us that when we say to children, sentences have full stops, we're not telling the truth.)

Next, note that four out of these 6 commands (every day use of that word) use the imperative: 'stand', 'hold', 'keep clear', 'take...care'. One of these imperatives has the word 'please' with it. (Never ask 2 grammarians what 'please' is in grammar. They will debate it for hours and in the end,you'll think it's either better to die or  just say it's...er...'please'.) However, in terms of social function, 'please' is incredibly important. It alters the whole tone of what's going on. In terms of those who can only see the imperative, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference.

Now, we come to 'Dogs must be carried'. Terry Eagleton's gag in relation to that one, of course, is to ask, 'Does this mean that when I travel on the escalator, I must have a dog?' His point was that we only know what it really means from the context. Yes, it's a command but not of the imperative kind. It tells us that if we have a dog we must carry it. Or two dogs. Or three dogs. They've all got to be carried (!) It is a command of equal weight as the others. But not with an imperative.

And now 'No smoking'. Again, a command but not an imperative command. Again, very interesting. The phrase 'No + an -ing word' is one of the ways people who write notices command us. It has its own mini-grammar. People interested in this sort of thing happily go off into speculating about 'what's left out' of phrases like this. I'm particularly not interested in that, because I am a firm believer in only looking at what's there, and not what's not there. 'No smoking' is using a standard command form in English, end of. It doesn't say, 'There will be no smoking' or indeed any other phrase which includes 'no smoking'. We just get it from those two words. It is a command.

So, children looking at that notice will, as like or not, 'get' what's being asked of them or their parents. They are demands and commands and orders each with a slightly different tone. You could indeed do a check on 'effect' by standing next to an escalator all day and seeing if people are standing on the right, holding the handrail, keeping clear of the edges, taking extra care of their children, carrying their dogs and not smoking. Whether there is a one-to-one cause and effect relationship between people reading the sign and obeying the instructions would be a fruitful area of exploration. After all, some of these signs appear elsewhere, the reason for not smoking might not be because this particular sign was read!

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that there is tons more fun (when you're 6,7,8,9,10 or 11 years old)  looking at a real notice like this, and thinking about 'please' and whether to carry your dog or not, then sitting in a classroom filling in a sheet that 'demands' that you spot the special 'command' required of the test, and reject the others - in other words where the examiner has stripped this piece of education of its social function and meaning.

The bits of understanding that 'Comprehension' doesn't reach

It's easy to think that 'comprehension' is what is done in comprehension texts. A close examination of these - or indeed a quick scan of the 'theory' of what's in them - tells us that it's a very narrow band of understanding being tested, and this may well overlook important understandings that children or school students are making.

As most people reading this will know, at the primary level, the three dominant things being tested are 'retrieval' , 'inference' and 'sequencing/chronology'. This ignores the fact that when we read we do something more 'global' than that which will draw on these three things, which is 'interpretation'.  There is no time sequence in which we first do retrieval, inference and chronology and only after that do 'interpretation'. We are doing these things simultaneously. However, because comprehension tests have to have right/wrong answers, there is no room for 'interpretation' as children and all readers will diverge on what texts mean, signify and tell us.

This wouldn't be a problem other than that with high stakes testing, of course teachers have to prepare children for the tests and so 'interpretation' takes a back seat, while greater emphasis is put on retrieval, inference and sequencing. This is allied with a strange and absurd line of work requiring children to invent what's going on in the author's mind in answer to questions like 'Explain the use of descriptive words'. Here, the child is supposed to know why an author has chosen these words. This too is allied with that all-encompassing, non-existent person 'the reader' as if all readers are the same, all texts have the same effect on all people, and - because the passage being examined is self-defined as 'good'- the text will be 'effective'. In other words, there is no room for the reader actually doing the exam to think the text is not effective. I made that mistake in an exam in about 1960  when I said that I thought a Robert Frost poem was 'sentimental'. Zero marks of course.

Interpretation, we know, thrives in open-ended dialogue with or without a teacher present. Aidan Chambers' book 'Tell Me' is a useful blueprint for how to engender this kind of conversation and writing. Nowadays, I fear, it can only thrive when the students and children are out of reach of the high stakes testing.

However, there is another area that is worth mentioning. One response we have to story of all kinds - whether that's a story in a book, a piece of non-fiction narrative, a film, a TV programme, a song, a poem, a comic strip - is to relate some other story or part of a story. In fact, it's embedded in high prestige criticism when people like Mark Kermode, say, allude to other films when he talks about the film that he's critiquing. We also do in conversations. I tell you that I fell over. You tell me that you fell over. This is often thought of as trivial.

Let's think about that. If I tell you how I fell over and you tell me how fell over, you have instantly created a category. You have made a classification in your head that we are doing falling over stories. If I told you I fell over a very small step, you could of course tell me a story about building steps in your back yard, in which case your category would be different, it would be 'steps'.

This is a form of abstract thought. We may not put names to the abstract in question, and we may not put a name to the kind of categorisation we're doing. We just pick out elements in each other's stories and relate one from within that element.

It is also a form of comprehension when applied to stories that we give children. It is a deep and important form of comprehension because it involves picking out something that we think is interesting or important in the story and relating it to something we know (or invent, if we make up a story in reply).  It is narrative-sharing as comprehension.

In summary, I would say:

"If, when you tell a child a story and the child tells you a story back, the chances are that the child has made an analogy between two or more aspects of the stories. This is the serious matter of creating categories or sets. It's hidden abstract thought. We need to give it space to flourish and dignify it with our pleasure and approval."

Trust the book, trust the writer, trust the reader

In workshops with teachers and children, I make a point about literature. I say that poems, plays and stories have 'great big hooks in them'. Writers are people who put an enormous amount of effort into ways of hooking their audiences in. Hooks might be things to do with how to create a scene in which there is conflict, love, achievement, hate, jealousy, fear or much else. It might be to do with the structure of that part of the piece - a cliffhanger, a distraction, a moment of suspense, a moment of tension, curiosity, puzzlement. It might be to do with the sound of the language, the way the sentences vary in length, the way the images ('figurative language') transforms something existing in one sphere of existence into another. It might be to do with how the story is 'narrated' - first person intimate? Distant omniscient? Multiple? Unreliable? Maybe we hear how everyone thinks? Maybe we feel strangely distanced from what is going on - yet this intrigues us?

As writers, teachers or children, we know when these hooks - or any other hundreds of small or big ones - work. We feel the effect of them.  We are drawn in to wanting to know more, to read more, to get to the end, to know the outcome. As a result we've been taken into a world of feelings and ideas - ideas about possible human action, how to face danger, how to have hope, what despair, fear, love, anger, danger and the rest feel like and much more.

Out of this comes wisdom. Literature of all kinds is about what human consciousness is capable of. By reading literature we confront our own consciousness with the ones on display. This requires us to interpret what's going on. This interpretation goes on at many levels - interpreting sounds, words, sequences of words, patterns of images, patterns of narration, human motive, evaluations of behaviour and thought, comparisons between life and what we're reading, comparisons between one 'text' and another - whether the texts being compared are other books, films, TV programmes, or the story that someone told us about their life yesterday.

 In some senses, this is all obvious. So why go on about it? Because the big push coming from the assessment and accountability people squeezes out a good deal of this stuff and suggests that wisdom is best acquired through the material dished up by mock tests and pre-tests. Or, even if this isn't an intended outcome, it happens all the same. I mean, the reading of poems, plays and stories in a space and time that let's the 'hooks' do their work, is eroded. Instead, hours and hours of time is taken up learning how to do comprehension questions in which the child has to retrieve stuff from the text, (what was A wearing?) or infer 'why A chased B' or repeat why z follows y follows x and so on. Far from enabling the child to 'get' the wisdom on offer, far from enabling the child to feel the power of the 'hooks', more often than not this kind of questioning dulls the child's response. I've felt it myself. I've seen it at work with my own children.

It's almost as if those who run education don't believe that literature offers wisdom and/or doesn't have these hooks. So, another alternative set of supposed wisdoms are on offer: retrieval, inference, sequence and the rest.

Another way of putting this is to say that education is in danger of moving towards a point in which it says, 'Don't trust the writer', 'Don't trust the book', 'Don't trust the reader', 'The only thing we can trust is the worksheet and the test - that's where the really important stuff is.'

The late great John Doona, who was a brilliant practitioner with Shakespeare and children, believed fundamentally in trusting Shakespeare. We did some workshops together around the first scenes in 'The Tempest': storms, shipwrecks, arriving on an island. The children or teachers explored fear, danger, relief, surprise, shock, mystery, curiosity. We experienced it through Shakespeare's words, our own actions and thoughts through improvisations, our own writing of songs, poems, speeches, dialogues.

I've done it with the story of Icarus and Daedalus which has two halves to it: the first part when the pair of them are imprisoned and are trying to find a way of escaping, and the second half when they fly towards the sun. In the exploring of these two halves, we can confront feelings and ideas about parent-child relationships, about the sources of knowledge, about what to do with wisdom, about overreaching ourselves, about transgression.

I've done it with the story of Hansel and Gretel and faced the question of fear of abandonment, actual abandonment and survival.  One one memorable occasion, a child improvised being Hansel or Gretel and voiced the thought 'What have we done?' - a profound insight into the introjected guilt that children can feel at the very moment in which they are on the receiving end of unjust punishment or mishap.

Again, I've seen it happen through open-ended questioning of Langston Hughes's profound poem 'I too sing America' where a group of white school students, unprompted by me, moved from viewing the poem as an indictment on how parents treat teenagers when guests come over to the house, to seeing a link between the poem and Martin Luther King's 'I had a dream' speech.

These interpretations, re-enactments, improvisations tell me to trust the story, trust the play, trust the poem. It has hooks. Given space and time, the children or students will be hooked, and their interpretations will be a form of wisdom.

"The most important things that you learn at school are not really to be measured in terms of qualifications." Hippy? Nope. Eton.

If ever you wonder what our betters think about education, one place to start is the brochure sent out to prospective parents for a school called Eton. Some of the pupils at this school go on to run the country and tell the rest of us what our education should be like. Below is the brochure. I've highlighted a few points that I thought were particularly interesting:




"At Eton we see the curriculum as something that embraces more or less everything that a boy does. You may ask why we see the curriculum that way. For many schools, the curriculum is just the academic part of what a boy studies. But that really doesn’t do justice to what an education is.

When all is said and done, a boy does not come to Eton simply to earn a set of qualifications. That is obviously an important part of what happens in the school, and we take the attainment of the best set of qualifications that each of our boys is capable of achieving very seriously, but it is certainly true that the most important things that you learn at school are not really to be measured in terms of qualifications.

When a boy leaves Eton, he will have five years’ experience of academic, sporting, dramatic, artistic, musical and, perhaps most importantly, personal growth to look back on, the greater part of the latter having been centred on his house and the friendships he has made there. He will almost certainly go on to university. That will add to those experiences. But what he does here, what he will do there, and what he has already done at his previous school, are just parts of an ongoing process that will enable him to become the person that he wants to be.

His parents are the most important figures in this process, and his school is no more than a contributory agent in the determination of the opportunities that will allow him to optimise what he wants to do with his life. When he arrives, much of his energy will be given over to learning to deal with new boys, new masters, the boarding-house where he lives, the complexities of the largest school he will ever have been to, and the at-times-bewildering and always-exciting range of opportunities that will confront, challenge and tempt him at almost every turn.

Life at Eton is rich, varied, exciting, challenging, sometimes even exhausting, but, above all, enormously rewarding. It is difficult to imagine a school that could offer a boy more opportunities."

Phonics helps us spell correctly? Really?

Debbie Hepplewhite wrote the quote below in this summer's 'Primary Matters, A Teaching English Magazine' that goes out to members of NATE. Could someone who is an enthusiast for phonics explain how phonics can be applied to help with spelling? So this is quite specific. It's not about what phonics can do (or not do) in relation to teaching the alphabetic code. Here's the quote:


"The job of teaching and applying the English alphabetic code* for spelling is NOT done by the end of the infants - it is just the beginning of a long-term need to be attentive, and to get to grips with, English spelling as an ongoing part of reading and writing."

*I assume she means 'applying phonics'. 


So, as I sit and wonder how to spell the words in this sentence, phonics might help me to spell 'so' 'I' 'sit', 'and', 'spell' 'how', 'in', 'sentence', 'phonics', 'help' but it wobbles when it comes to 'yes', 'as', 'the', 'wonder','to', 'words','might', 'comes'. 

To clarify: I know that these words can be sounded out and/or learned by sight (ie not totally and solely phonically) but if I come up with alternatives e.g. 'yess', 'azz', 'ther', 'wunder', 'werds', 'mite' or 'cumz' how will phonics, and phonics alone help me choose the right one?

It's especially not helpful with 'to' because learning my 'tricky' words or 'red' words (depending on which particular approved scheme I have been using), I know that there is 'to', 'too' and 'two' but neither pure phonics or 'tricky words' tells me which one to choose and it's making me very nervous.


I have heard the justification that says it's phonics that tells me that each of the three forms (to, too and two) begin with 't' but the demands of the writing tests say that I can't be a bit right, or a bit wrong. I am either completely right or completely wrong. If I choose the wrong 'to'/'too'/'two', I'm stuffed. It will show that I am not working at the expected level.


If no one can back up Debbie Hepplewhite on this can someone at least offer me a suggestion for what it is she actually meant?

By the way, does Debbie really mean that we have to go on doing phonics forever? I mean how long-term is 'long-term'?

(I don't have a comments facility on this blog because it'll become a troll-magnet, so can you answer on twitter, Facebook or by email?)

ps I'm also thinking about all those English suffixes like '-ent' vs '-ant' or '-ible' vs '-able' or '-ince' vs '-ence' vs '-ance' that we all get wrong at least sometimes. How do phonics help us with those? And all those wrong spellings where we double up a letter where we 'shouldn't' but the sound stays the same: e.g. 'dissappear'. Phonics doesn't tell me that's 'wrong'. 

Kafka and education

In the Kafka Museum in Prague there is a reconstruction of the torture machine (sometimes translated as a 'harrow') that is described in Kafka's story, 'In the Penal Colony'. The note on the wall in the exhibition says:

"Justice protects itself from the punishment it imposes by situating the execution of the sentence in an autonomous sphere, but at the same time the prison-model spreads throughout the social body, establishing mechanisms of surveillance and control which go to the heart of the modern city.'

Michel Foucault is name-checked earlier in this piece and it was Foucault who made connections between prisons, asylums and schools in order to typify modernity.

I found myself thinking about the English education system and how some of us object to the way in which the people running it at the moment are mostly privately educated. As plenty of people have noticed, one 'virtue' of the private education system is that it enables a small group of people to evade some of the day-to-day state control and surveillance meted out to children, teachers and parents within the state system. This means that we could re-phrase the sentence above along the lines of saying:

'Ministers of Education come from a background that is protected from the rule it imposes by situating the enactment of their commands in an autonomous sphere, but at the same time this model spreads throughout the social body, establishing mechanisms and control which go to the heart of the modern city.'

The key difference between prison and education is that very nearly everyone goes to school while only a minority go to prison. In that sense, education IS the 'social body'. We all experience it, we all learn something from it, not just in the sense of what we are taught but also in the hundreds of subtle ways we learn about where we are in this 'social body', what we're entitled (or feel that we're not entitled) to do and say in it. Quite literally, we enact that old dictum: 'Know your place!'