Battle of Stalingrad poem

1950s

My mother, Connie Rosen, née Isakofsky
fought at the Battle of Stalingrad
on our kitchen table.
Her hands moved to an' fro 
round the plates, in and out of the salt and pepper.

She told it so that it was thanks to Stalingrad
the whole world had survived
her dreams that the world could be better
had survived
she had survived. 

New poem for your class

Here's a new poem for teachers and parents. You can try doing the repetitions in the poem with groups or all joining in. These repetitions are meant to be a bit like a Greek chorus, so when the chorus joins in you could turn the 'I' into 'they' or  'he' or 'his' etc.  So the 'I' lines, Mum and Hornby Teacher are solos, and the chorus lines are groups who say, 'he'/ 'his'/ 'their' etc. Experiment with it, anyway. 

If it suggests to you or children about things that they had to do in Nursery or Kindergarten or at any other time, they could write about that? Or perhaps it's about conversations between teachers and parents about the child. They might like to try this chorus repetition writing, too. 



In the afternoon at nursery

In the afternoon at nursery

we have to go to sleep

we have to go to sleep

In the afternoon at nursery

In the afternoon at nursery

I won't go to sleep

I don't go to sleep

because of the...

because of the...

HAIRY BLANKET

HAIRY BLANKET

I won't go to sleep 

I won't go to sleep 

I won't go to sleep

under the hairy blanket.

The hairy bits get into your ears

into your ears

The hairy bits get into  your eyes

into your eyes

The hairy bits get into your mouth

into your mouth

So I won't go to sleep in the afternoon

I won't go to sleep in the afternoon.

The hairy blanket is an army blanket

a browny greeny army blanket

a browny greeny hairy blanket

left over after the war.

I wriggle and wiggle 

I jiggle and squiggle

under the hairy blanket.

I don't go to sleep.

I won't go to sleep.

Hornby Teacher the Nursery Teacher

says to my Mum

Michael won't sleep in the afternoon.

Michael won't sleep in the afternoon.

My Mum says to me:

Why won't you sleep in the afternoon?

Why don't you sleep in the afternoon?

And I say to Mum

I don't go to sleep because of the...

HAIRY BLANKET

I won't go to sleep because of the...

HAIRY BLANKET

Is that it? she says.

Is that what's bothering you?

Is that it? she says.

Nothing else?

And, I say, and, I say

and, you're not there

in the afternoon

when we're supposed to go to sleep

You're not there in the afternoon

when we're supposed to go to sleep.

You're not there. 

Austerity-con; transfer of wealth from poor to rich

Prof Richard Drayton (Kings College, London) in Letters LRB (24 Jan 2013):

'...if there was a such a large and growing gap in the public finances, was it an urgent problem of over-expenditure, or was it really a crisis of revenue collection, as tax laws favourable to corporations and a lack of enforcement allow an ever increasing share of GDP to escape the public purse? What is clear is that in May 2010 the percentage of UK GDP which went to servicing debts, even after the impact of the 2008 crisis, was, at 2.5%, at the lowest level enjoyed by any Conservative government since...1900. By no metric in 2010 was the present or projected debt burden of the UK in historical terms very high, let alone unsustainable.

...

The price of austerity will be a long-term decline in the standard of living of the majority of the population, and an acceleration of the now thirty-year long experiment in transferring wealth from the poor and middle classes to the richest.'

Children today can't talk. Really? Really?

In many different contexts I hear a similar cluster of statements around children's 'vocabulary', children's language, children's speech. This runs something like this: many children today have very 'poor' language, very 'little' language, they can't speak properly, they have very poor vocabulary, they can't express themselves...and so on. Or it's more specific than this and it's problem with 'poor' children, 'working class' children, 'immigrant' children and so on.

Most of this evidence seems to come from encounters between the adult who is talking to me and the child or children they are describing. I can say honestly that I've had similar experiences: I've gone into classrooms and tried to engage in a conversation with a child and failed. The child has just spoken to me in very short yes/no type answers.

However, I don't think my encounters with children prove anything at all about how such children speak, how they might speak, or what kind of language they have at their disposal. All it shows me is how that child speaks to an adult, who, in my case, is a stranger, a male, speaks received pronunciation, with standard English dialect elements.

I suggest that if we ever want to find what children can and can't talk like, we need to set up situations in which they are most able to talk fluently, talk in an engaged and thoughtful manner. I would suggest that this would be in situations where they have something to say to each other about something they care about, or something that are deeply engaged in making or doing or planning. This would or should mean having no adult present.

This is not difficult to set up. All it requires is for there to be a job to be done: whether it's planning something that the children really want to do or make; or it's in response to seeing a film or reading a book or poem where the questions that they are discussing are ones that have no right or wrong answer (eg does this book/film/poem remind me of anything that ever happened to me? Does it remind me of any other book, film, TV programme etc that I've seen? Are there any questions I could ask anyone in the book/film/TV programme etc? Can we together answer any of those questions?)

Then all it needs is for the children to agree beforehand for this to be recorded.

Then all it needs is for you or anyone else to be willing to transcribe these conversations and to analyse what is being said and how.

There is a literature to help people do this eg 'Understanding Children Talking' Nancy Martin et al; and even a chapter in my parents' book 'The Language of Primary Schoolchildren'.

I would suggest that we cannot make legitimate statements about children's language unless we start to analyse transcripts of children talking in the situations I've described.

If anyone reading this is interested in carrying out research like this, do get in touch. I'm on twitter, facebook and my email address is on the top right hand corner of my website.

Tories: Puritan-style

This is a preliminary note on what could or should be a serious and lengthy analysis.

I ask myself, what links the kinds of things that Ian Duncan Smith and David Cameron say about 'strivers' and 'shirkers'; the ever tighter clamp on schooling that is exerted by the testing and examining system; performance related pay; the use of the word 'rigour'; today's announcement by the Schools Minister that nurseries should spend time teaching toddlers how to read and do maths; Big Society - charity etc; Austerity talk in the midst of approving of the accumulation of wealth;

It's picking a strong strand from what the Puritans were saying in the 17th century. Their themes were moderation in all things, industriousness as a virtue in itself, a turn away from priests and churches as being the sole site of virtue and wisdom and asking the individual conscience to be responsible for his or her own actions, duties, responsibilities. Radical Puritans were egalitarians and said that poverty was a virtue, but the non-radical ones, praised the rewards of industriousness even if that reward was wealth. Idleness was a sin in itself and anyway, led to evil thoughts and actions. Education of the child was all-important but mainly in order to save the child from his her evil ways - children were  born sinful or 'fallen' and it was the job of parents and schools to beat virtue into them and teach them moderation and industriousness.

There have been significant revivals and metamorphoses of Puritanism other forms of Protestantism and  this isn't an attempt to unify them or equalise them. Different times, different forms. It just seems to me that knowingly or not, this Tory regime keeps picking up on themes first articulated clearly in Britain in the late 16th and 17th centuries.

In 'Measure for Measure', Shakespeare attacks the hypocrisy of one form of this Puritanism in power, as expressed by the character and actions of Angelo, the temporary ruler of the city state. In other words as early as 400 years ago, people sensed that though Puritans could talk the talk of being 'pure' and fighting evil, even as they did so, particularly if they were powerful, could in fact commit the same 'sinful' acts that they claimed to despise.

One of the most repulsive scenes in recent times has been the sight of a rich people voting in the House of Commons to ensure that poor people get poorer. And then laughing about it. Deep at the heart of all this is the notion that 'people on benefits' are idle. (According to Osborne they are lying in bed behind closed curtains.) This is a core Puritan idea.

Language watch 1 - Lance Armstrong: I? he?

I thought that I would start putting up occasional looks at language use as and when they occur to me.



One of the events of the last week has been the Oprah interview with Lance Armstrong. Through most of the interview he used 'I' (the so-called 'first person') when talking about himself, but, as many people have noticed, every now and then he referred to himself as 'he' or even in one part as 'a guy' ('third person').

The question we can ask is whether this is just an interesting way for us all to talk about ourselves when we're talking about ourselves in public, or whether there's deeper stuff going on.  Followers of English football will remember player, manager and commentator, Kevin Keegan, used to be keen on referring to himself in heated moments near matches as 'Kevin Keegan'. He would explain that Kevin Keegan doesn't do x, or does do y. This usually involved some sense of honour or sporting sincerity.

Here's what Armstrong said when talking about himself:



"That is a guy who felt invincible... Truly believed he was invincible. That's who that guy was. That guy's still there. I'm not going to lie to you."


My first reaction on hearing (and seeing) this was to assume, along with many others that this was evasive, a way of not accepting responsibility for what earlier and later in the interview he admits he did. We can use all sorts of constructions for doing this and I'll look out for more as part of this 'Language watch'.

The 'evasiveness' argument is that to say 'I' is like naming yourself as the 'agent', the doer, the person who acted, the subject of the verb, who caused something to happen: eg 'I did that thing.' So, the argument runs, to say, 'he' is like saying it's someone else, it's that other guy.

But is that what Armstrong is doing here? Here's another alternative: in this particular case, he is doing something akin to putting himself in a glass case and looking at himself. Or more: he's putting himself into that 'display' position and asking Oprah (and the viewers) to join him in looking at the exhibit.

Aha, says the counter-argument, look how he distances himself by saying, 'That's who that guy was.' That guy isn't even here! But then, almost as if Armstrong is aware of what that sounds like, he modifies what he's just said, 'That guy is still there.' In other words, as I interpret it, that guy is still in the glass case. And then in his next utterance, he says, 'I'm not going to lie to you.' He switches from 'that guy' and 'he' to 'I'. Again, with my model of what I think is going on, it's as if he is standing next to exhibit A (himself), first inviting us to look at the exhibit, and then drawing our attention back to him, the exhibitor, to say, 'I'm not lying to you.'

Of course, he may be, he may be not. He may have been evasive in all sorts of ways elsewhere in the interview, particularly over the matter of whether to implicate others. However, in this short passage, I don't think that I'm running with the pack and saying that this particular construction is evasive. If anything, I think that linguistically, it invites us to view the speaker as an item on show - which of course he is, what with being on a TV show with millions watching.  So, perhaps it's 'collusive', he is trying to join us as viewers of himself. He is admitting he was/is a liar. He is acknowledging that we are watching him saying this in a mass spectacle. He is coming out of the TV set, sitting alongside us, standing next to us in a bar and saying, 'See that Armstrong? He did doping and lied about it.'

Now, the next argument to have with that, though, is whether this is just a false honesty strategy, as if he is saying to himself, 'I will make myself look so much as if I'm coming clean, I will put myself on the slab, step away from myself, and take you on a guided tour round myself, to show just how bad I was, and just how honest I am being now.'

If this scenario is anything like the bit of pyscholinguistics going on, then the falseness and self-deception going on is to believe (or get us to believe) that it is possible to step outside oneself in order to  view oneself. We can behave as if we can do that but in reality it's impossible. When we take up the position of viewing ourselves, we do it with the being that is the self! There's no escape. However, we can, as Armstrong is doing here, putting on a good show of viewing himself as if he is not the self doing the viewing. Indeed, if the self-viewing persona is anyone in this linguistic construction, it's either Oprah or it's every single viewer.

And in this particular circumstance, Armstrong is not Mr Ordinary. He's the world famous guy who has lied, lied about lying, sued those who said he was lying and is at the very least concealing a whole load more about his associates. He clearly wants people to think that he is coming clean. I suspect that he thinks that the guy saying, look at that bad guy, thinks he is better than bad guy. Bad guy lied. Good guy is, in his words, 'not lying to you.'


ps - we have the construction, 'I am someone who...' which moves the agent from 'I' to a 'third person' ('I' to 'someone') and which has the possibility of generalising ourselves, or perhaps objectifying ourselves. We turn the 'I' into a more general being, a type, a member of a group of people who are similar. This too, you could argue, contains the possibility of moving away from 'me' as being the agent to a wider group who do or think the same sort of stuff. In that sense, long before the invention of 'sociology', we have had constructions in language which enable us to think and talk sociologically. Some have said that the Rastafarian, 'I-an-I' (I and I, meaning an inclusive 'you and me' equal in the eyes of Jah) has a similar sociological sense and effect.

Grammar for teachers cont'd: prepositions or not

Prepositions

Most native speakers of English have no problem with prepositions. The system or grammar gets absorbed and understood when children are very young. Years ago, I worked on BBC Television's 'Playschool' and I used to watch 'Sesame Street' with my children and I could never understand why we and they spent so much time making up stories and sketches about 'in' and 'on' or 'to' and 'from' and the like. I've never had a sense that children 'get these wrong' without being taught. Perhaps they do, and I've missed it.

BUT...

...the moment we start chopping up language into grammatical categories, we run into difficulties. The reason for this is that the categories are nearly always 'vertical' (see earlier blogs for this), but we speak and write language horizontally. In other words we are sticking words, phrases, clauses and sentences together, horizontally.

So, in a vertical sort of a way, we can hunt through a piece of writing looking for prepositions. We pull them out (vertically) and think (perhaps) about what might happen if we replaced them:

'I'm running to the shops.'
'I'm running from the shops.'
(vertical replacement)


All day long we use prepositions like: to, from, with, at, by, in, on etc.
and preposition phrases like back from, on to, off of etc.

And please remember, I am citing all these out of context. In English, we very frequently make the same word do different jobs in different contexts.

The way we use these words as prepositions is often in adjectival and adverbial phrases.

'I am going to the doctors'. Because 'to the doctors' seems to be talking about 'am going', rather than 'I' we say that is adverbial. Because it doesn't have a finite verb in it, some would say it's a 'phrase' and not a 'clause'. Adverbial phrase.

Around the verb 'to be' (am, is, are/was, were/etc) we use a lot of phrases using prepositions:

'I'm in the bath.'
'He's not back from the shops.'

These appear to be describing the 'I' and the 'he' so they are adjectival.

You remember the adverbs called 'sentence adverbs'? eg 'Eventually, the plane landed.' Well, if adverbial phrases can act as sentence adverbs we ought to be able to birdspot prepositions there too:

'By all means, go.'
'In the circumstances, you could do that.'

So far, fairly straightforward.

But English (and all languages, in truth) are more complicated than that.  One of the ways this complication business shows itself is in they way we construct verbs. As English developed, our ancestors wanted the action of verbs to express things like direction and place - and many metaphorical uses too -  and they invented (and we go on inventing) 'phrasal verbs'. We construct these by taking a main verb like 'get' (and this is one of our favourites for doing this) and add words which in other circumstances we might call a preposition. What is extremely hard for children (well, anyone actually) being asked to spot prepositions in adjectival and adverbial phrases, is to distinguish that usage from the one in a 'phrasal verb'.

For a bit of fun, see how many different ways you can use the verbs 'get', 'take', 'go' by adding words that look like prepositions. What you're trying to do is make brand new verbs not simply using 'get', 'take' and 'go' in their core ways, like this:

'Being in London, really got him down.'
'It was difficult, but he took it in.'
'I don't go in for that sort of thing.'

These kinds of expressions, 'get...down', 'take...in', 'go in for' are a crucial part of how we construct the way we want to talk and write. Describing them grammatically is another matter altogether.

The reason why I'm raising it now is because
a) we sometimes ask children to spot prepositions but words like 'down', 'in', 'off' are very useful to us for attaching to verbs to make new verbs. In these situations many linguists would say they are not being prepositions.
b) in circumstances like these grammar is not easy and grammarians themselves differ over how to name and explain what's going on.

Most native speakers of English have no trouble using these expressions.

I asked him over and over again to put the picture up. He did in the end. I put the picture on the table for him.
What did he put the picture up with?
He put it up with a nail.
He put up with that, did he?
What?
You asking him to put the picture up.
Yes, he did.

One core verb: 'put'
One phrasal verb: 'put up'
Another phrasal verb: 'put up with'.

Now, at this point I'm going to chicken out.

If you want to get a glimpse of how a very reasonable text book handles the grammatical description of this whole area, take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb

Notice how, wikipedia's contributors aren't afraid to say how complicated it is, how inconsistent the descriptions can be and how grammarians differ in their terminology.

If only, people who tell us what we should tell children would be as flexible and open-minded.