Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! I’ve used this... Continue Reading →
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! Last week, I... Continue Reading →
Recently whilst reading an article in NATE’s excellent Teaching English I came across this from TS Eliot: ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. I think this is a fascinating idea to contemplate. First, I’m interesting in the qualifier ‘genuine’. Does this therefore imply in Eliot’s mind there is genuine and then disingenuous poetry?... Continue Reading →
If you teach English Literature at GCSE or A Level at some point you will need to teach either a single volume of poetry or a poetry anthology. The typical way to approach this, and the way I do it, is to take a poem or maybe two poems at a time and devote one... Continue Reading →
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! Live modelling is... Continue Reading →
Students often like to write about enjambment and alliteration, likely because they’re very easy to identify, but they rarely do so well. Often points about these two poetic strategies might align to something related to flow, making the reader want to read on, or the alliteration of ‘a’ somehow and inexplicably mimicking something that the... Continue Reading →
It all too easy sometimes to get lost in the small stuff of textual analysis. The micro. The single words and images. This is, it goes without saying, key to any literary discussion, but so is the macro. The big stuff. The conceptual. How might we build into our classroom routines more opportunity for such... Continue Reading →
When thinking about English and English teaching I like the word ‘resonance’. It seems to me to capture so much of what good English teaching and thinking is about. When we read ourselves, no doubt, we traverse the texts for little light bulb moments, moments of insight and connection. We’ve all experienced this: ‘Ah, that... Continue Reading →
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! Why and how... Continue Reading →
Earlier today I was reading, or rather listening, to Rob MacFarlane’s excellent book Underland when I came across a fasctaining concept that I wanted to share, and that I think will have a lot of mileage with various GCSE and A Level texts. The concept is that of ‘solastalgia’, which, as MacFarlane outlines, comes from... Continue Reading →
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