Higher English reappraised - again

Joanna Blythman had a sensible post in Sunday's Herald about the latest flurry in Higher English exam circles. Ever since the last change - when Higher Still appeared and drastically reduced what was actually externally assessed - I've felt the lack of any chance for students who wrote well to capitalise on their ability. It was never the same merely to be told by your teacher that you had reached the required standard to sit the exams - for that, in essence, was what happened. It somehow devalued the whole process to have the person who was teaching you say "yes, all right - you've made it". Even when the folio of the previous system was being prepared for external assessment, it was possible for the teacher to collude in raising the standard by direct interference, and it was presumably to remove that suspicion that the folio system was changed, but it still left the teacher with the say-so on what stage the candidate had reached and deprived the student of the stimulus to show off in an exam. Even after several years of retirement I have a couple of ringbinders filled with the excellent writing of past pupils - kept to encourage others to reach the same standard, or to give ideas to the faltering - and I can still remember the content of many of the essays.

Actually I'd like to go much further back. I agree with Neil who tweeted a wee while ago that he'd like to see the Report brought back to Higher English. This involved the student in assimilating several documents, including sometimes a graph, on a given topic, and then writing a cohesive report which conveyed the facts as contained in the material. Creative it was not. It called for understanding, organisation and the ability to write clearly and dispassionately - skills which are actually more useful to the majority of students than the ability to write a description of an emotion or analyse a metaphor. It gave the less creative, clever mathematician a chance to excel in one area of English, and had an obvious spin-off in other subjects like Modern Studies.

To me, Higher English recently has become less stimulating for pupils and teachers as texts became more prescriptive and the need to stop and examine halted the flow of the year. There seemed to be less space to develop the realisation that if you could do one area of analysis you could do any others, and that to write well was exciting and challenging and a cumulative process. I grant that the all-or-nothing exam at the end of the session struck terror into some pupils - but why is that such a bad thing? Are we all going to sail through life without such moments? Some chance.

I'd suggest that if - as Blythman suggests - there has been a dilution in the standard of text studied, and if - as I know is the case - too many teachers concentrate on the parrot-learning of the formula which will produce a passable critical essay at the expense of a real understanding of how a writer's craft works, then it's the training of teachers we need to look at. Maybe any teacher entrusted with teaching Higher needs to be regularly appraised and sent for retraining if he falls short of the standard our best pupils deserve. Maybe the time currently spent on internal assessment would be better spent exploring a new poem - pupils and teacher together, unprepared and excited by what they can find. On one-to-one discussion of how to bring writing alive, while others write on, absorbed in what they create. On showing teachers what is possible, and firing them with the need to share it. And then, after nine months, examining the results in the old-fashioned, open-ended way with the excitement of a real end-product to all this engagement and effort.

Bit like having a baby, really.

Choices

Bluebells
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

It's election day. I haven't voted yet - I've been sitting in this sunny garden among the scent of the bluebells reading in The Guardian - or should that now be the guardian? - why voting for the Nationalists might not be a good idea. Actually, I probably wouldn't anyway. I tend to vote tactically for the parliamentary elections and personally for the council - and I must say it's great having an issue with the Roads department in the run-up to an election! Such attentiveness ...

And yet, as I think about strolling up to the polling station, I can't help a small twinge of rebellion - a sort of 'damn the consequences' moment. I'll see how long the twinge lasts.

My garden is where I was teaching last night. One of my students was discussing her choices for revision in view of next Friday's Higher English. She's sticking to poetry and prose - and probably hoping for MacCaig and Lessing - because she didn't really get studying drama this year. And guess what - she's really fed up that the class abandoned Shakespeare for Meedja Studies. She doesn't feel it's really English.

I laughed at her - told her she was a real traditionalist. But guess what? She made my day.

Teaching...still.

I was once again thinking of retiring properly - of not teaching anyone for a bit, now that Higher English is almost upon us - when out of the blue came the kind of proposition I just couldn't ignore. A luminously bright student to "educate" in the old-fashioned business of Eng. Lit. - Shakespeare and that kind of thing. My choice. As a by-product, we achieve a Credit 1 next year and a Higher A the year after. A challenge, but goodness does it sound like fun.

So I'm doing it, and we start in a couple of weeks. At the moment I'm thinking about the best online methods of keeping the impetus going between lessons. Ewan has already suggested using Skype and Google Docs plus a blog of best work. I've not used Google Docs before, so want to see how it compares with Quick Topic for ease of use (if anyone already has a take on this I'd like to hear from them). I realise that doing this sort of thing only intermittently means I get left behind a bit, but at the same time I relish the prospect of some real hard work on exciting texts.

Today I suggested to my current student that she might like to sit in the garden for her lesson. I don't know whether it was the proximity of the exam or the sunshine and cool breeze that gave her an edge, but she's doing much better at the old Interpretation. (I'm sure I shouldn't be calling it that.) Exam weather always has a bittersweet edge to it. Let's hear it for all the kids facing exams right now!

Deathless prose?

I've just had one of my pupils in, anxious about how to write a critical essay on a piece of journalism the class had studied. She'd missed the lesson and was floundering. We spent an hour of hard analysis; it was quite a humorous piece with some good tricks of the trade to talk about. But I felt myself increasingly puzzled by the content. It felt .... dated.

Answer: it was dated. Dated 1991, in fact. It was photocopied from a book - presumably a collection of writing from the period when the book was first compiled. It would be out of date before publication. What is the point of this? Journalism is surely, by definition, fresh - we can admire the style of a master like, say, Clive James, but he was even funnier first time around.

For most of my teaching career it was really difficult to supply good up-to-the-minute factual prose in quantities suitable for class use. But now that there is widespread online access to global journalism, should we not be encouraging our students to explore, to find what is worth reading - and to justify their choices? And if they're going to write about it in the SQA exams, what chance is there that the examiner will have read the same piece? It's not Wuthering Heights, for heaven's sake.

I dunno. It made me feel sad, this sunny holiday afternoon, to see that 16-year-old piece, photocopied and annotated. And I'm afraid it showed. We have a long way to go.

Food for thought?

Rather self-indulgently, I want to share the vision of the trout we ate tonight. No, I don't fish - but we have a great fish van which comes on a Wednesday, and these beauties were firm, shiny and smelled of the sea rather than fishy. Their flesh was almost salmon-coloured, rather than the rather insipid pink I associate with lesser trout, and the flavour, after grilling with olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and capers, was to die for.

And before that I was delighted to learn that one of my private Higher English students has benefited from the work we did on preparing her to write her Personal Study under exam conditions. She passed this particular NAB first go - a tribute to the important place of organisation and prior discussion in helping pupils with their critical analysis of a text they haven't been taught. I have a feeling that not enough time is spent on this, and yet it's something that weaker students can do well in, even if a traditional "closed book" exam leaves them struggling.

I think I deserved that trout.