Starter activity – focus upon adjective associations: In the space below, circle the adjectives you must associate with celebrity Wonderful Fantastic Corrupting Marvellous Terrible Appalling Bad Good Thought-provoking Moronic WRITE DOWN SOME OTHER ADJECTIVES YOU ASSOCIATE WITH CELEBRITY MAIN ACTIVITIES – preparation for media exam: 1. Read the following article and write a summary of […]
Compare and contrast two poems which show how the families of soldiers suffer as a result of the conflict. OR Compare and contrast ‘Spring Offensive’ with one other poem of your choice which uses vivid imagery to convey the horrors of war. OR Compare and contrast the differing attitudes of the […]
‘Mercutio and Tybalt are trouble-makers who are presented by Shakespear as thugs who cause many of the problems in the play.’ In the light of this statement, analyse Shakespeare’s presentation of these two characters, saying whether you agree with it or not. OR ‘In attempting to solve the problems of the two lovers, […]
‘His fingers squeezed around my throat, I felt myself starting to choke…’Using this first line as a starting point, continue this story remembering to use the same person (the first person pronoun) and write in the past tense. (Make sure that you structure your story carefully, and you use the FIVE SENSES and FIVE Ws […]
Emphatically not! Orwell’s last novel has not survived the test of time. I know this through the hard graft of having to teach the dreary novel to reluctant Year 10 and 11 students. There are a number of serious flaws with the book. First and foremost, the plot is predictable and relatively undramatic: a miserable […]
Teaching to the SATS tests can be murder. Recently, they have become more and more fiddly – and more boring. In English, there is a complicated reading paper, which consists of lots of small questions that pupils have to answer precisely to get a good mark, a writing paper which never seems to test writing, […]
As a teacher, I’ve tried every bribe in the book The news that a mother rewards her 13-year-old daughter with cigarettes when she behaves has confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a while – rewards are, at best, ineffectual and, at worst, positively damaging. A jobless single mother, Tracy Holt, 43, of Gosport, Hampshire, is […]
This is the full text of a speech I gave under the title ‘Silent Voices, Still Lives’ Welcome and thank you for coming. My talk is entitled ‘Silent Voices, Still Lives’ and focuses upon the importance of teaching communication skills properly in schools. It is divided into two parts: firstly, I will look at the […]
In this emotional indictment of our education system, the writer and teacher Francis Gilbert explains how an obsession with testing has broken enthusiasm for learning The decision by the Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, to kill off the Sats exams for 14-year-olds is arguably the most momentous decision taken by a politician since Gordon Brown became […]
Is stirring a pupil’s passion all that matters in edcation? Ken Robinson’s new book, The Element, suggests that this is at the heart of getting the best out of children. I appeared on Radio 3’s Nightwaves arguing a little differently. I said that if teachers just tell pupils to follow their passions then they could […]
The truth about exams So just what is the key to success at GCSE? As a teacher in various state schools for the past two decades, I still chew over the issue virtually every day! Just recently, I was talking late into the night at a Year 11 Parents’ evening. The parents of these sixteen-year-olds […]
It’s only when pupils put flair into their writing that they become competent When I first saw the word ‘competence’ stuck into the new English National Curriculum last summer, my heart descended into the abyss. Oh no, I thought, here we go again; yet more injunctions to give lots of boring grammar lessons which the […]
Without leadership and discipline, chaos rules. But this is exactly what the Government is allowing to happen, argues Francis Gilbert A few years back, I taught at a school that terrified me. Just walking down the corridor was hazardous. Frequently, children would rush up behind me and hit me on the back of the head, […]
This week thousands of children were denied places in their first choice secondary school. Here, a teacher argues that our education system is as crisis-ridden as our banks. The parent sobbed openly at the reception of the secondary school where I teach: “But it’s not fair! You have to let her in!” Our secretary had […]
Teachers are demanding a 10% pay rise. To educate the country out of this recession, we should give it to them I bet there were a few teacher-hating members of the public chucking their breakfast at their television sets this morning when they saw the moaning members of the National Union of Teachers asking for […]
On Saturday the work-shy teachers at the NUT conference backed a boycott of SATs. On Sunday they moaned about too many tough guys going into teaching (if only!). On Monday they demanded an eye-popping 10 per cent pay rise and yesterday they were threatening to strike over the vagaries of sixth-form funding. What next? A […]
A useful page of links to English language teaching resources can be found on the Guardian‘s website here.
The premise of this book is intriguing for anyone who is remotely interested in politics or education. The privately educated Peter Hyman was an advisor to Tony Blair from 1994 until 2003; for the last two years of his tenure he rose to being Head of Strategic Communications at Number 10, and was one of […]
I found Sutcliffe’s novel very easy to read, skipping through it in a day. I particularly enjoyed the way Matt, the features editor of a lad’s magazine, was depicted. The scenes where his mother gate-crashes a launch party he’s at, bosses him around in his warehouse flat, sets him up with a girl are funny, […]
Will the teaching council ever learn?
The new code of conduct for teachers is a masterwork in stating the blindingly obvious and deeply patronising The new draft of a code of conduct and practice for teachers really made me laugh. It’s a big and wordy document from the General Teaching Council for England (GTC) and full of the off-putting, sanctimonious language […]