Reblogging this to my own blog from Smorgasbord…Comments welcome, as always, here or there!
Month: February 2018
Testing times
Sadly, the fronted adverbial raised its ugly head again this week, and prompts me to blog again about teaching children to use language. Cathartically, I imagine the fronted adverbial as a long necked carnivorous dinosaur, head waving from the primordial swamps in search of food. Entertainingly, it bobbed up on Michael Rosen’s Facebook page. Angrily, I read the rotten saga. Happily, I remembered I’m no longer a teacher. Crossly, I empathized with those who are. Achingly, I sympathized with the children.
Do you now know what a fronted adverbial is? Certainly, now I’ve modelled it ad nauseam, and you didn’t need to know the term for it anyway, because you’re not linguistics professors. Neither do children in junior school.
To be fair, I believe there’s some confusion over whether children themselves are supposed to know the term or just their teachers. I’m not churning through pages of Dfe* bumf to find out, but I can tell you enough people seem to think children need to know it for the 87,700 results of my Google search today to start like this:
(I’m not knocking my colleagues who produce these although I do think the one Rosen showcases needs to chill. You teach what you’re told to teach as best you can, and teachers are wonderful at sharing resources and ideas – the less prepossessing the subject, the more they rise to the challenge.)
A lesser relation of the fronted adverbial, the irregular past participle is another busy little pest that scuttles about causing mayhem to even younger children. Once it infested my classroom. The previous week, I’d teached regular past participles (a benign member of the same genus). We called them Ed. We walkEd about and talkEd about them, lookEd for them, hookEd some from the pages of our books, took – oh dear! and shook – gadzooks! – some into our writing and I releasEd the children into the playground where they shoutEd and playEd and exercisEd their dear little limbs in the satisfaction of knowledge learnEd (t?!) and a past tense story inventEd. Hooray!
For the more literal minded of you, I didn’t teach the …ed suffix with a capital letter. I’m just banging home the point here. I did teach “…suffix ed” (yes, 6 year olds have to know the term suffix) with ellipses (I’m not sure they have to know ellipses but see comment on government documents above) and I telled them “Poor …ed. It isn’t a full name, it can’t go out on its own, it’s just the last part of another word, so it never has a capital letter.” “My name’s Ed and it does!” saided a boy. “Couldn’t your mummy have taken you on an unauthorised holiday today?” I spat through grat teeth.
I’m not against teaching grammar. I remember starting French, discovering verbs, nouns and adjectives and thinking this is jolly useful. A rule to apply. An apparatus to climb. A tool for cobbling together sentences. I wonder if you can do it in English too? Ah, yes… Why didn’t they tell me at junior school? The 1970s approach needed and the current approach needs to consider what’s age appropriate, from either end of the spectrum.
The advantage of grammar is government can test it, (like testing scales or memorising the periodic table. But would anyone teach those before playing tunes or lighting a bunsen burner?) The advantage of test results is government can judge the test takers and test teachers easily, categorise a school as in “special measures” (ie more tests), and solve the problem with an academy that makes money for shareholders. I first heard that from an Ofsted inspector and suspected her of conspiracy theories. But fast forward six years and these tweets make the same point:
Oops. That’s what happens when I don’t plan a post strictly enough – someone else takes over the rant. Where was I?
Teaching grammar can be fun. I invented the “Full stop police” and the children begged to play again. One child reads aloud and the “police” clap where the full stops should be. “Pass the full stop” requires a satsuma, representing a full stop. It’s passed around and the child holding it when the narrative comes to a full stop gets a segment. Or throw a black foam rubber ball… etc. There’s pleasure in finding patterns and rules in every subject. Nothing wrong with that, but do it at the right age. Infant children should be playing snap, not bridge. They should absorb the harder rules by exposure to good and varied writing, and have more time to read and listen to stories.
Teaching grammar can also be profitable. Here’s an article about what grammar schools earn from publishing mock tests for their entrance exams. They’re expensive to a parent on a low income, at between £28 and £60, as are the tutors to mediate them. Do I detect another conspiracy theory?
Let’s return to my 6 and 7 years olds, in their second week of past participles:
Me: Hallo children. Today we’re going to write another story. (Some smile, some groan. Children can be irregular too.) Another story set in the past.
Child (sounds pleased): With Ed!
Me: Do not call out, Jason. No, …ed will not be in this story.
Children (chorus): We likEd Ed.
Me: This week, children, we’re going to meet the irregular past participle. Soliloquy: Irregular PP is to PP as the hornet to the honeybee. He stings big time, repeatedly. A single attack can be enough to kill a child’s interest in writing for life, without expert treatment. You are only 7 – many of you are only 6. There is no known vaccine. So tread carefully, my dears. Better staff than I have lookEd at their year 2s and quailEd. Time for the dreary trudge of exposition.
Me: Any suggestions from you? Hands up! Readed? No, sorry. Eated? No. Buyed? Wented? No. Ringed? Like “the bell ringed?” No. Singed …now, you heard what I said about “ringed” so don’t push it…
Child: (piping voice, shellshocked tone) We’d be safer if we just didn’t use verbs at all.
Little Amaara: (weeping) We won’t be able to write anything without getting it wrong! And I was looking forward to finishing my story from last week with Ed. (Puts head in hands.)
I remember when there were few government teaching guidelines. Poor or nonexistent guidelines, poor planning (including mine), inadequate resources, firebells, abusive behaviour – all these cause difficulties and part of a teaching career (not the part they show in the recruitment ads) is learning to overcome them.
I “helped” children sew when I was sew untrained myself I sewed trouser legs together (that’s another story). I was tasked with explaining STDs to embarrassed teenage boys who spoke no English. I attempted painting when the only paint in the stock room was brown, and gluing with Pritt Sticks that dried up before the pupils were born. I triumphed over an interactive (huh!) white board that wouldn’t be reorientated no matter WHAT so the pen never connected with the surface. I taught forces with magnets that didn’t work due to badly designed storage. I’ve written poems about snow with children who weren’t allowed (health and safety) to play in it.
But when the irregular past participle came buzzing along for the 6 and 7 year olds and nouns became noun phrases and verbs became present progressives and exclamations had to start with What (How ridiculous!) I wented home and choosed a fortifying drink and after 32 years I writed an email with my resignation.
Mischievously, here’s a possible slice of revenge. On many Government web pages, there’s a bit at the bottom that says:
Have fun! But remember not to include financial information, duh.
Sorry about the rant. Will be back to posting about books, next week, via Smorgasbord,
©Jessica Norrie 2018
Grandmother’s footsteps
My grandmother’s front door had panels of stained glass in a multicoloured grid design, so a child could gaze through and turn the inner lobby shades of pink, green, blue or yellow – dark for her mahogany hall table, light for the walls, overlaying already patterned floor tiles with new moods and stories.
In Gran’s cold bathroom, the terrifying wall mounted “Ascot” heater gasped as though about to explode. For all that, the water never trickled in warmly enough to dissolve the bath salts she kept in pretty pastel coloured layers in a glass jar on the tub (no shower). We slept under blankets, and paisley patterned eiderdowns (no duvet). There was a mangle to dry her hand washed clothes and bellows for the coal fire (no heating). Seagulls squawked close to the rattling single glazed sash windows with sills deep enough for a child to play on behind the curtains. She needed thick curtains, for the high ceilinged rooms were huge and freezing at the edges: we were always either too near the fire (come away, you’ll get scorched) or too far from it (come closer, you’ll catch a chill).
The house loomed vast against the sky, and drained my grandparents’ resources. My grandfather had started life as a factory foreman and must have had some kind of buy to let mortgage, moving away from London to the cleaner air and cheaper property in St Leonards-on-Sea. The basement flat was let to a family, with a separate front and garden door. That didn’t stop us going down the internal stairs at whim on unannounced visits (I wonder now how the family felt about that). After my grandfather died in 1967, the upper floor was also let as bedsits, to ancient ladies who struggled up to their rooms by walking past my grandmothers’ bedroom and lounge doors (Oh, how I would like a hall way just for me.) A spry retired headmistress (?), her name easily remembered as she was Miss Toft in the Loft, rented the whole attic floor. To get there she too went through the hall and up carpeted stairs (more paisley, and ferns in brass pots). Our summer holiday job was to fill in the threadbare patches from little pots of red and black poster paint because your eyes are sharper than mine, dear. No paint on the stair rods, please. Stair rods! When did I last see those?
The balcony room was their living room. Early 1950s.
The further balcony was the next, semi-detached house so the living room was warmest.
Waiting in the wings is a novel in which I hope to use such details. Meanwhile I’m drawn to searching for similar plunderings by better authors. Children’s literature is full of grandparents’ houses. Laura Ingalls Wilder remembered hers even though she moved away at five years old and never saw it again. “The floor was made from wide, thick slabs that Grandpa had hewed from the logs with his axe….smoothed all over, and scrubbed clean and white and the big bed under the window was soft with feathers.” L M Boston’s wonderful Children of Green Knowe series is set in Grandmother Oldknow’s house, where the architecture of the house itself enables her grandchildren to have adventures with their ghostly ancestors. And the beautiful domestic detail of Shirley Hughes’ illustrations for Alfie and Grandma would embrace anyone in need of a cosy home, whatever their generation.
But there were surprisingly few grandparents’ houses in the fiction for adults on my shelves. Of course, outside the Western world many grandparents don’t have separate homes. From Europe I found Proust‘s blend of domestic detail with memory and emotion. This begins at his great aunt’s home, imagining himself “lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy…back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling.” Elsewhere you have to hunt for ghosts through clues in the narrative: surely Galsworthy, writing in 1906, was calling on memory for his description of old Jolyon the patriarch’s house: “The door of the dining room was open, the gas turned low; a spirit-urn hissed on a tea tray, and close to it a cynical looking cat had fallen asleep on the dining table.” For a direct if malicious approach I was pleased to find Great Granny Webster still in print, though Caroline Blackwood appreciated her ancient relation’s entrance in Hove less than I did my grandmother’s thirty miles east: “… a huge forbidding black front door, which had a hideous stained glass covered porch full of potted plants that had to be watered day and night”. Anyone struggling with writing settings could take lessons from this short novel from 1977.
More recently, Anne Enright’s The Green Road casts spells in economical Irish prose garnished with select detail: “Hanna loved the little house at Boolavaun: four rooms, a porch full of geraniums, a mountain out the back, and, out the front, a sky full of weather… and not much Hanna was allowed to touch. A cabinet in the good room held a selection of china. Other surfaces were set with geraniums in various stages of bloom and decline; there was a whole shelf of amputees on a back sill, their truncated stems bulbous to the tips.” Enright leaves us to fill the little-used “good room” with our imaginations, while the geraniums take centre stage. Diana Athill, herself now over one hundred, has a chapter on her grandparents’ garden in Alive Alive Oh! “After breakfast Gramps would tuck The Times under his arm and proceed in a stately way to the privy… and if you noticed him going past a window you must pretend you hadn’t.” As so often reading Rachel Cusk I stopped half way through Aftermath with a shock of recognition: “In the gas-smelling kitchen, rain at the windows, my grandmother buttered the cut face of the cottage loaf before she sliced it.”
These sights, so out of date already, still exist in easy living memory (Cusk is at the beginning of her 50s and I’m nearing the end). Memories from childhood have a dream like quality which, if bottled, would make a fortune for some writing consultancy. (Proust’s got closest so far.) Memoir is currently a trendy genre – hardly a week goes by when I’m not invited on some memoir writing course. I wonder if the demand is so high now because planning laws have relaxed and we are so busy obliterating our past? In these days of gutting old houses, stripping every internal feature to turn them into open plan white cubes, we must nurture our memories. Despite more ways than ever of recording our thoughts, the record itself is more fragile (think email as opposed to letters, thousands of photos forgotten on a hard drive rather than a few curated in an album). If you still have the chance, talk to your grandparents now, photograph their homes, record their thoughts and their daily routines. The pickings are rich, and moving. I’ve found it a homage and a privilege to write about my mother, my father, and now at least one aspect of one set of grandparents. I hope this encourages others to do the same. (Oh, and if you know someone who lives in the house above, do get in touch.)
©Jessica Norrie 2018
What a difference three days make
I wrote this post on Tuesday, 30th January, admirably ahead of schedule for today.
Authors don’t have false starts, because all changes are part of the multiple drafting processes. But authors often have false ends – they think they’re done, and then a beta reader, editor, agent, or their own head says no you’re not, and back they go to the text, rectifying, snipping, embellishing, reshaping (it’s beginning to sound more like a haircut than a book).
Finally, in desperation, boredom, defiance or pride off goes the manuscript. Agent, here you are. I’m prepared to rewrite, but only for a commercial publisher. Failing a publisher, I’ll self publish! But either way, that book is done to a turn.
Author takes time off. Eats toffees, ambles round the park, sneaks to an exhibition. For some, it’s only a few days before they’re thinking: next book? I’m assuming this process gets faster as they notch up the novels. After my first, I ummed and ah’d for months before I had any tentative thoughts, let alone jottings. The second novel is traditionally tricky for all authors and often referred to kindly (or patronisingly) as a hurdle to vault en route for the sunlit uplands of the third, merrily mixing metaphors as you go. But with one remarkably debonair click of the mouse, off went Second Novel last week. I hope you’ll hear of it again in some form, but if not, never mind: already this week idea number three is tickling my brain.
This time, I’ve taken advice on what the market wants. Well, heard advice anyway. I can’t write gripping psychological thrillers but that’s ok, I’m told people want something more cheerful. I can’t write minutely researched historical fiction, because I’m too slapdash and anyway, they’re so last year. I won’t write violence and I don’t understand science fiction and I’m irritated by cosy crime. I’m too down to earth for fantasy and I can’t invent some new literary form so novel (pun intended) and mould-breaking there’s a new book prize established in my name. But I’ve spotted a chink in the genre armour, a tiny keyhole of opportunity and I’m going to try and tailor something to fit its requirements. Third Novel won’t take four years like First Novel, or two like Second. I’ll knock it off in time to present it to my agent by Christmas and save the expense of a more conventional gift.
Only yesterday I was shuffling around the house feeling pressured and heavy (is it a good sign that this wild mind can go from haircut imagery to submarines in four short paragraphs?) Today a couple of characters introduced themselves as I walked round the block – what a help a sunny day is. The setting’s in the bag – the longer you live the more places you’ve known: how useful. There’s a glimmering of plot, always the hardest part for me. I have a very corny working title and a fragile 3000 words in a New Folder. To think there are people, events, ideas and developments ahead just waiting to be pulled out of my head and fastened on the page! It’s exciting like going up in a balloon, like candy floss (revolting but I’m in such a good mood it sounds nice), like the letter with my place at university, or the moment the clouds lifted from Mount Fuji.
If my idea works and I keep writing, I’ll get to the drudgery stage quite soon. If it doesn’t – well, that’s one reason for publishing this blog post today. The edifice can’t come crashing down because so far it’s only sketchy foundations, but even if they sink without trace, even if the fleeting inspiration, er, fleets, I wanted to pin down the excitement of the almost blank page(screen), the promising project, the journey in prospect. Also, if I’ve announced it, maybe someone out there will hold me to it.
This is what I have to say this morning (Friday 2nd February):
The Magic Carpet (I may as well dignify Second Novel with its title) came back from agent yesterday with third round of comments (let no one say agents don’t earn their 15%). Most remarks justified, and he’s “still not sure about the beginning”. (This has been changed often. It’s surprising how moving different chapters to the front can herald a different genre each time – not necessarily one I want or that subsequent chapters remain faithful to.) I would now like to put it behind me, frankly. But if The Magic Carpet never flies, even on CreateSpace let alone commercially, how will Third Novel ever soar free of those Second Novel blues?
No time for Third Novel today after considering agent’s comments and writing Friday blog post. Perhaps the blog should go? Perhaps Magic Carpet should be fed to the moths? Perhaps it would only be Third Time Unlucky?
The End, as written on Tuesday, 30th January: Back next week if not too busy!
The End, as written on Friday, 2nd February: Back next week (possibly).
©Jessica Norrie 2018
Words and Fictions 
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