Fun With Food/Simile

A couple of fun, interactive lessons here, inspired largely by Trevor Wright's How To Be A Brilliant English Teacher - a book which I'd highly recommend to prospective and practising teachers alike. A rough overview of the lesson is here, and at the foot of the article there are links to download the full lesson plans and associated resources.

Lesson One: An Introduction to Similes
Just get on with lesson – no messing. Draw a large circular shape on the board and label it – “head like an orange” will suffice. Stick an ear on it and label it – “ear like a cauliflower” will do the job. Offer the pen to a pupil to have a go. Repeat until you run out of steam.

Discuss your character. Give him a name. Why is better to say he has “spots like baked beans”? Get to a point where the word ‘simile’ is mentioned. The kids will hopefully now understand the concept – get them to prove it... Each pupil has a post-it note. They have to write what they think a simile is. Collect them, discuss them, arrive at a definition and get them to copy it into their books.

In their books, pupils are to complete this sentence: I think the poet has used lots of similes because... Feed back and hopefully someone will come close to answering today’s LO: To explore why writers use similes.

Head like a potato

Show the kids the a picture of a someone with an interesting face. They must describe them without using any similes at all. Feedback – and be critical. Ask them to do the same task again – this time they must use loads of similes. Feedback – there should be much to praise. Pupils swap books and make one positive comment on how the description has improved from the first version to the second.

To wrap things up, pupils must work with the person next to them to produce a definition of simile – without using the word ‘as’ or ‘like’. Once you've got a definition you're happy with, let them pack up!

Lesson Two: It Tastes Like...

First, pupils must unscramble the red words in the learning objective and copy it into their books.
LO: To lime issues to describe food.
LO: To use similes to describe food.

Following the last lesson on simile, pupils should have a good idea what it is and how it works. So just launch into this lesson and they’ll hopefully follow enthusiastically...

You need some foodstuffs. My suggestion would be some Chilli Heatwave Doritos, some pineapple and some chocolate – enough for everyone to have some. Pupils will take it in turns to eat an item before writing a suitable description in their books. Initially they must begin “it tastes like...”

1. For the first item (Doritos) there are no restrictions on what they can write. It could ‘taste like’ anything they want.
2. For the second item (pineapple) they are not allowed to describe it in terms of another foodstuff.
3. For the third item (chocolate) encourage them to describe it in a way which doesn’t mention taste at all: it feels like, melts like, etc.

After each stage, discuss which descriptions were the best and why. Hopefully you’ll get some really creative ideas and can make a record of the best ones on the board and in books. Have the kids realised that in saying ‘it tastes like’ they have created dozens and dozens of similes?

Hand out and read Thorarinn Eldjarn’s Froots & Vegedibles (link below). Pupils are to pick three of the absurd foodstuffs and describe them using similes. Pupils should describe taste, appearance, texture or anything else that tickles their fancy. Feedback, sharing descriptions and maybe try and guess which fruit/veg they are describing.

As a quick plenary, ask the class to use a simile to describe what today’s lesson would’ve tasted like if it were edible! 

Lesson One
An Introduction to Simile Plan

Lesson Two
It Tastes Like Plan
Froots & Vegedibles Poem

An Intro To Everyday Metaphor

I've just started reading James Geary's I Is An Other, a magnificent book about the power and prevalence of metaphor. Surprisingly, he believes we use around six metaphors a minute - some of which are obvious, some of which are the skeletal remains metaphors which have become so commonplace as to be invisible. It's a fascinating book and excellent reading for anyone with an interest in language.

For me, it has proved inspirational. I've never seen metaphor taught as anything other than a literary device - and often this teaching has been dry and prosaic. Surely it would be better to give students a grounding in the everyday nature of metaphor before examining literary applications for it? If they realise how often metaphor is used in their daily lives - and by themselves - surely they'll be far better placed to understand it a more academic sense.

With that in mind, i've designed a quickfire whizz through everyday metaphor which references Elvis Presley, Andy Carroll, Australian weather forecasters, the human skeleton and, obviously, young Romeo of Verona. As usual, it's not gonna be perfect - i'm only a learner myself. But the activities, questions and ideas in this plan can be adapted and modified to your own purposes.

I'd anticipate the lesson taking an hour and the Powerpoint slides are not necessary at all unless you enjoy a little visual stimulus (or just like gazing at Elvis).

An Intro to Everyday Metaphor Plan
An Intro to Everyday Metaphor Handout
An Intro to Everyday Metaphor Slides

Singh Song by Daljit Nagra

During my time as a TA, I saw poetry taught very badly, very often. Two 'old school' teachers I observed seemed to believe the hallmark of good poetry teaching was ensuring that pupils had reams and reams of notes scrawled all over their texts - regardless of whether they understood them or not. I hated this approach - it amounted to little more than dictation and encouraged little thought, analysis or interpretation. Wherever possible, I would step in by offering to teach the lesson or by interjecting vociferously. Thankfully, the teachers encouraged this and the pupils seemed to enjoy it. Hopefully they learned something, too.

So now, despite having not yet started my PGCE, I'm bravely putting my lesson on Daljit Nagra's 'Singh Song' online. I focused on how Nagra created the character of Singh through language. Hopefully some of you will like it and use some of the ideas within.

Following some fantastic feedback from the Twitter community (much of which is in the comments section below), this plan has been revamped and reconfigured in an attempt to make better use of learning objectives, assessment and structured questioning. It's quite different to before - and hopefully much improved!

Click the links to download the plan, accompanying Powerpoint slides and handouts. All of these can be downloaded as regular documents or PDF files.

Singh Song: Creating Characters Through Language
Sing Song: Powerpoint Slides
Singh Song: Extracts Handout
Singh Song: Standard English Handout


Thanks to everyone who offered advice - it's much appreciated!

The Inclusion Delusion

I once engaged my line manager in a semantic debate about the term ‘inclusion’. I lost the argument. My defeat came not because I was wrong, but because she was blinkered to the point of self-deception, unwilling to concede that there might be better/alternate strategies and inflexible to the point of idiocy.

The best word to describe my previous school’s inclusion policy would be ‘exclusive’. Those in ‘inclusion’ were removed from their classes, their subject teachers and their peers, seconded in an (admittedly well equipped) subterranean classroom and taught by unqualified teaching assistants. These lessons were not the same as the ones their friends were receiving and often consisted of time-filling tasks followed by some ‘reward time’ on a computer when they’d been judged to have ‘done enough’.

My manager (the head of SEN) simply failed to see that, semantically at least, ‘inclusion’ was a misnomer. These kids were not included in the life of the school. They were separated and treated differently, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and a cycle of unwanted behaviours which saw them unable to ever escape: take a kid with behavioural issues, isolate him for a period and watch what happens when you release him back into circulation. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this bundle of repressed energy is likely to explode – and in damaging ways.

I’m only at the beginning of my teaching journey and still retain an air of idealism: I don’t want pupils removed from my classes unless all other alternatives have been exhausted. It benefits nobody to marginalise and label children as ‘trouble-causers’ or to believe them ‘unteachable’. For me, inclusion means ensuring that every kid in my class feels safe and able to learn. If that’s not the case, I’ll blame myself – not them.

Am I insane? Misguided? Are my experiences typical? Let me know!

Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance

If one more person tells me how hard my PGCE year will be, I’ll rip their spinal column out with my bare hands and whip them to death with it. I know how difficult it will be. I am ready for it. And I have been preparing.

Already, I’ve raced through some excellent books about teaching. Not dry academic tomes, but useful and practical guides by leading practitioners of the art of teaching. Phil Beadle’s How to Teach was absolutely magnificent, Trevor Wright’s How to Be a Brilliant English Teacher was even better. David Didau’s The Perfect Ofsted English Lesson is next on the agenda and already looks to be rammed with useful and usable ideas and tools I can use in my own classes. Rex Gibson’s guide to teaching Shakespeare is already on my bookshelf. If there are other reads you’d recommend, please let me know. 

My previous career in a secondary school has also furnished me with absolutely invaluable experience. I’ve observed two years of English teaching at every age group and ability – very few of my contemporaries will be able to boast of that much experience. And in that time, I taught dozens of lessons – and learned lessons from them. I have a good idea of what kind of teacher I’ll be and the approach I find most comfortable. I already relate well to kids and get on with them brilliantly. I’ve experienced every behavioural challenge imaginable (i’m aware that some are simply unimaginable).

I have a cache of lesson plans which I’ve already written. They’ll need to be moulded into my university’s style and adapted according to my classes, but the bones are there to be fleshed out. Time consuming planning like that for the Moon on the Tides anthology is largely done - provided my placement schools study either Relationships or Character & Voice .I’m halfway through producing a scheme of work based on a zombie apocalypse which will be the starting point for all sorts of writing tasks. There are dozens of other plans either completed or ready to be written over the next few weeks. Some of them might never see the light of day but what’s the harm in practising?

What else can I do? What else should I be doing? I’m probably ahead of the game already but I want to be over the hill and far away by the time September ticks around. Your advice, tweets and comments would be massively appreciated.

A Triumverate of Terrible Teachers

Lurking in classrooms for two years, I have seen some truly outstanding teachers at work. They are a significant minority. Most are merely average. Some are appalling. A few are worse than that. Here are the least effective educators I’ve seen in action...

The Dictator
An English practitioner who literally dictates everything to the kids she ‘teaches’. Whether it’s mnemonics, annotations on their poetry texts or scribbles in the margins of their Dickens, her shrill cry of ‘write this down’ punctuated the air at least 472 times per lesson. The pupils were, understandably, bored shitless.

Clearly a woman who knew the subject inside out, she was exhausted with teaching: out of ideas and in desperate need of reinvigoration. I often taught her class and wrote her lesson plans for her – as much for my sake as that of the students. These lessons were designed to be fun and interactive, with specific objectives, written outcomes and genuine learning. She marvelled at my ‘originality’ and promised to use such approaches in the future. I recently had my last lesson with her and she took me aside to tell me, “It’s okay having all these activities and exercises, but make sure they write everything down. If they have notes of everything you can’t be accused of not teaching them it”. I despaired.

The Bi-Polar Bastard
Somehow this individual inveigled himself into a senior position despite being an utter charlatan. I rarely saw him actually teach anything thanks to his ‘hands-off’ approach to independent learning. His classroom was an utter shithole, filled with festering coffee mugs and cluttered workspaces around which he pranced like a preening peacock performing for his captive audience. Worse than this, however, was the fact that the children never knew where they stood with him. One minute he’d be their best friend: smiling, laughing, joking and joshing like an admirable older brother. Within seconds a perceived slight would see him transform into a snarling, aggressive bully bawling out his young charges like they’d just tweaked his grandmother's nipples. An odious, self-obsessed man blissfully unaware of the contempt his classes hold him in.

The Dotty Old Bird
One of the loveliest women in the world, this fifty-something English teacher was not cut out for a today's schoolroom. Unable to turn on a PC, badly out of touch with the ‘yoof’ and the worst disciplinarian ever to set foot in an English comprehensive, every lesson was a battle. Kids entered and exited her class as they pleased, nobody ever completed any work and nobody ever listened. Pens were used exclusively as missiles, black market chocolate bars were traded and profanities peppered the air. And she stoically battled on, unaware that not a soul in the room was listening to a word she said. School prefects turned into animals in her lessons, aware that there were no sanctions for their disgusting behaviour: The Lord of the Flies for the 21^st century. A former grammar school teacher, she simply was not made for an inner-city comp and was chewed up and spat out into the pile marked ‘long-term sick’.

As useless as they were, however, these three terrible teachers did at least contribute positively to someone’s education: mine. Hopefully I’ll never make the mistakes they made, never stop caring and never forget that I am not the most important person in my classroom.

Kids Are Not Dumb - Not Even The Dumb Ones!

The role of Teaching Assistant affords a unique perspective on the classroom. Placed amongst the students, the TA is neither a teacher nor a pupil. Accordingly, they are treated as a hybrid of the two: an adult the kids can trust and conspire with, but also learn from and admire. It’s a wonderful  position to be in.

Although it’s usually advisable to shut them up before they divulge exactly which laws they broke or how much vodka they imbibed at the weekend, it can be wholly instructive to listen to the pupils talk about school life. The truth emerges about playground rumours, their perspective on classroom incidents vary wildly from the staffroom equivalents and their true feelings about the teaching staff are laid bare. After two years of being privy to such revelations, i realised that students are enormously perceptive and hugely demanding when it comes to their teachers. Here are the three keys things i learned:

1. 1  If a teacher doesn’t turn up, they got no respect.
2. 2  If a teacher doesn’t do what they say, they get no respect.
3. 3. If a teacher doesn’t make a class work, they got no respect.

(for the uninitiated, respect is a huge fucking deal to teenage kids) 

Some of these ‘revelations’ might seem counter-intuitive or surprising. But they shouldn’t be. Kids are not dumb. None of them. Some might be less able than others, but every single one of them can see straight through a faker. They can spot a bullshitter. They know when you are ‘phoning it in’. They will hate you for it. And they’ll make you suffer for not doing your job properly.

1. There are a number of kids in schools who live unstable lives. It’s your job as a teacher to provide some measure of stability for them. This means being in their lesson EVERY SINGLE DAY. If you’re not there you are letting them down. You are failing them. You undermining your own teaching by suggesting that your subject is not important. You are implying that it’s okay for them to miss your lesson – after all, you do! Worst of all, you are leaving them with a substitute teacher and a shitty pile of pointless timewasting tasks which will never get marked: cover lessons are not taken seriously by anyone. Kids hate teachers who miss lessons and have absolutely no respect for them: do not be ill and do not put yourself forward for every school trip available: DO NOT ABSENT YOURSELF FROM YOUR OWN LESSONS.

2, If you show weakness and inconsistency, kids will eat you alive. If you fail to keep your promises or follow through on your threats, they will seek to take advantage at every available opportunity. They will quickly ascertain how to appeal to your better nature, worm their way into your affections and talk you out of your sanctions. Set out your standards for behaviour and then adhere to them ruthlessly. Contrary to what you might think, they will respect you for this - because they will always know where they stand with you. They will know your threats are never empty. They will not be able to complain that others are treated differently or that they are being victimised. 

3. Once you have managed to drag yourself into school and instilled some discipline in your class, don’t forget to make them do some work. Proper work. Set objectives and teach to them. Make them think for themselves. Communicate clearly and enable discussion, groupwork and peer-to-peer learning. Make them write things down. Ensure they can recognise their own progress. And then mark their books, grade their oral work and praise them to the heavens. Kids like doing work. But they don’t like boring work. They like fun tasks, variety and thinking for themselves. They like clarity in their teaching and they like the work they produce to be appreciated and graded so they know how to make improve the next time. You would not believe the number of times i’ve heard kids moan about teachers who “never make us do any writing” or who refuse to work because “it won’t get marked anyway”.

Isolated from the reality of the classroom, cocooned in their bubbles at the front of the room, too many teachers are blissfully/painfully unaware of the demands their students have of them. I’ve sat through too many shitty lessons with ill-prepared teachers to ever make those mistakes myself: if i want my kids to respect me, i have to treat them with respect too.

An Introduction!

At the age of thirty I decided to become an teacher of English. This was a problematic/idiotic decision for a lot of reasons, chief amongst them my complete lack of relevant experience and my completely irrelevant degree. So I started at the very bottom of the teaching ladder: I became a teaching assistant.

Two years on, I'm about to embark on my PGCE. I've worked with every age group in my inner city school, working exclusively in the English department and observing the whole secondary English curriculum taught by a variety of teachers. I've clocked up hours of teaching time myself and learned enormous amounts about life in schools: hopefully this will give me a massive head start as I work towards NQT status.

Predictably, I learned most from those teachers whose style and approach I held in disdain - and there were plenty of shitty teachers in my school. But there were also wonderful, inspirational staff members whose success lessons I will seek to emulate, copy and shamelessly pass off as my own for years to come.

Over the course of the summer I'll be detailing what I've learned in my teaching career so far. Names will be changed to protect people's identities and salaries - but I'll not hold back from corruscating criticism of those who deserve it (teachers with appalling attendance records, my feckless manager and Michael Gove will be getting both barrels). The many positives (and they far outweight the negatives) will also be detailed.

From September I'll document my journey through my PGCE, share my lesson plans and thoughts on teaching, and hopefully inspire debate and conversation amongst fellow students of language, literature and education. Here we go...