My Name is Mina…

David Almond’s latest is a delightful foray into the charms, quirks and passions of Mina’s mind.  As Marcus Sedgewick remarks in the Guardian – not much happens, but it is all captivating.  There are beautifully sweet moments like Mina and an old neighbour shouting at the soil, to bring Persephone, and spring to the surface.  Almond has always conjured moments like these but he has added some William Nicholson-like criticism of the education system.  Mina’s home schooling (currently an issue in Waterloo Road too) is central to the book, and her effective exclusion from the system occurs on the day the education system reaches its nadir, SATs exams in Year 6.  But Mina is not only critical, she offers solutions.  Her lesson ideas are scrapbooked throughout under the title – extraordinary activity.  The best is the result of her only caring educational experience at a PRU.  She writes a story by leaving the page blank.  It prompts extensive class discussion and invention.  Indeed the book would work as an exemplar for much of the current English Programme of Study.  All the techniques, styles and purposes are on view.  Just as he argued in ‘the Savage’, Almond shows how the markers of high level reading, writing and speaking and listening required by the National Curriculum are possible in Year 6 and 7, if only parents, teachers, neighbours, even taxi drivers listen and encourage kids’ expression and adventure.

FootballTrainingwk2

LiP – HRs abuses and military intervention – using Film – Blood Diamond

Blood Diamond (15- but with extreme violence at the beginning) as intro to Sierra Leone case study – searing, political and romantic.  Link to UK intervention in Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor trial (Naomi Campbell again) and Tony Blair doctrine – e.g.http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/14/sierraleone1.  Need to find original documentation and testimony.

AmnestyUSA has detailed curriculum guide which cross references resource conflicts in Columbia, Nigeria, Cambodia and Cote D’Ivoire, and extensive sources and links. http://www.amnestyusa.org/education/pdf/bd_curriculumguide.pdf

Amnesty UK also uses it as part of their HR profile raising – http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=10836#blood.

John Bayley the master communicator…

John Bayley on TeachersTV providing solid gold ideas:

For an experienced teacher who sets detailed LOs at the start of the lesson – make TERMLY ones – ‘You could share your learning TARGETS…my aim for this term is that you will be able to answer in extended sentences, know the difference between factual, comparison and speculative answers, and that you will be able to comment on each others answers…’

For a 5 years’ qualified teacher: ‘What do you make of this character at the front?’ [i.e. you]. / On rounding up the lesson – give instructions – ‘In five minutes this lesson is going to end…Remember I’m going to let the 1st row go first, then the 2nd… I’m going to be going to be looking for you sitting up with your books and bags away before you go – that’s what I’m going to see.’ / Setting objectives even for handing out books – ‘ How you hand out books is important – I will be looking for you to hand it into the other person’s hand.’

With NQT – On importance of standing still for presentation – ‘Plant your feet’. / Invite them to tell you what they understand – x – what does that mean in your own words (with get out – nominate someone else – then go back to x to explain) y- can you put that in different words?’ / Timings – use of wind up clock to agree time for task – Here’s what we’re trying to achieve in different phases of the lesson – invite them to help you work with it. ‘/ Plenary – using the last ten minutes is a very high professional skill.

http://www.teachers.tv/videos/great-expectations-1 /

http://www.teachers.tv/videos/too-much-talk

LiP – Footballers’ privacy injunctions

John Terry’s case is looking like an aberration, after injunctions restraining publication about footballer’s private lives granted?  http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/uk-world-news/2010/08/28/england-footballer-wins-injunction-100252-27158672/ http://www.solicitorsjournal.com/story.asp?sectioncode=2&storycode=16844&c=1&eclipse_action=getsession

Can’t find transcripts on http://www.bailii.org/ as yet – even though not super injunctions.

Lessons in progress – 31ers express themselves in Moscow…

FoExp case studies – Ongoing battle for freedom of expression in Russia.  Links in with UK treatment of protesters – lots of good material here – http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/g20-police-assault-ian-tomlinson.

Article 31 of the Russian constitution guarantees – ‘Citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to gather peacefully, without weapons, and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets.’ – See Guardian and RFE content - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/30/russian-protesters-31ers /http://www.rferl.org/content/Russian_Police_Break_Up_Article_31_Protests/2000057.html

[http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/ch2.html / http://www.constitution.ru/en/10003000-03.htm]

Work in progress…

Mini scheme of work trialled last term:  Topics – Right to Life using McCann v UK, Right to Privacy/Freedom of Expression (Naomi Campbell and John Terry), Right to Participation (Art 12 UNCRoC) using the General Election.  Posts on topics to follow.

JW’s Battle of the Sun and Ron Carter on Dickens’ timeless language

Ron Carter’s analysis of the opening three paragraphs of  Bleak House (in Working with Texts, p113-5) is a reminder of how constructed Dickens’ writing is.  Carter shows that there are no ‘finite verbs in main clauses in the text’, providing no ‘anchor’ in Time.  The timelessness of present participles such as ’waddling, jostling, slipping, sliding…’ echoes the reluctance in OMF and GE to tie the text down to a particular moment in time, something Jeanette Winterson avoids with the specific date 1601 (although would they have had booze-cruises in 1601?) and then subverts with Silver’s time travelling and the Dragon’s enigmatic pronouncement,

‘…Time passes,’ said the Dragon, ‘ the clock chimes, men are born, grow old, and die, the world changes. All that is true, Jack, but that is not the sum of truth.  You are young, but your deepest mind is as old as the mind of the first man who ever was, and what he saw, you can see, and what he knew, you can know, and what he feared, you fear too.  You are many Jacks, many minds, many lives, but you live this one now, and that is what you see, like a man in a great house who confines himself to a single room and a single view…

Jack thought of the Thames and how his mother had told him that the Romans had rowed up the river and how in those days, so far away, the banks were thickly wooded and mammoths roamed the land.  And how there were rich houses along the banks of the Thames, and the mammoths were all gone, but the river still ran its course.  It was the same river.  Perhaps his mind was like that river…’ (JW(2009), p94).

The Fog, timelessness of verbs and confusion of craft makes a tuneful river that echoes between Lizzie, Gaffer, Pip, Herbert, Provis, Silver and Jack.

JW’s Battle of the Sun and Dickens on the Thames…

Reading Jeanette Winterson’s Battle of the Sun reminded me of Dickens’ river writing in GE and OMF – I liked it that much! “And this is the life of London rolled out like a carpet and played like a tune…’ (JW, 2009, 212).  Beautifully and intricately rigged and fitted out writing… 

‘…At that time [1820-ish?], the steam traffic on the Thames was far below its present extent, and watermen’s boats were far more numerous.  Of barges, sailing colliers, and coasting traders, there were perhaps as many as now, but, of steam-ships, great and small, not a tithe or a twentieth part so many. Early as it was, there were plenty of scullers going here and there that morning, and plenty of barges dropping down with the tide; the navigation of the river between bridges, in an open boat, was a much easier and commoner matter in those days that it was in these; and we went ahead among many skiffs and wherries, briskly.

Old London Bridge was soon passed, and old Billingsgate market with its oyster boats and Dutchmen, and the White Tower and Traitors’ Gate, and were were in among the tiers of shipping.  Here were the Leith, Aberdeen and Glasgow steamers, loading and unloading goods, and looking immensely high out of the water as we passed alongshide; here were colliers by the score and score, with the coal-whippers plunging off stages on deck, as counterweights to measures of coal swinging up, which were then rattled over the side into barges; here at her moorings was to-morrow’s for Hamburg…

‘Is he there?’ said Herbert…

‘Now I see him!  Pull both.  Easy, Herbert.  Oars!’

We touched the stairs lightly for a single moment, and he was on board and we were off again…Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty chain-cables, frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys, sinking for the moment floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal, in and out, under the figurehead of the John of Sunderland making a speech to the winds (as is done by many Johns), and the Betsy of Yarmouth with a firm formality of bosom and her knobby eyes starting two inches out of her head, in and out, hammers going in ship-builders’ yards, saws going at timber, clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps going in leaky ships, capstans going, ships going out to sea, and unintelligible sea-creatures roaring curses over the bulwarks at respondent lightermen, in and out – out at last upon the clearer river where the ships boys might take their fenders in, no longer fishing in the troubled waters with them over the side and where the festooned sails might fly out to the wind…’ (CD, 1861, GE, vol3, ChXV, p397-8)

‘…In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone [ages], as an autumn evening was closing in.

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognisable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with his rudder lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out.  He had no net, hook or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boat hook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in a cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze.  The tide which had turned an hour before was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as  the boat made slight headway against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as she watched the river.  But in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror…’ (CD (1867) OMF, p1)

Jeanette Winterson on London and the Thames…

From JW’s fantastic ‘Battle of the Sun’, lovely noun and verb lists, and giving it to the whelk woman.  

‘…It began as all important things begin – by chance.  It was about twelve o’clock midday.  The Thames was busy with boats of every kind; oarboats, sailboats, whelk boats, wherries, tideboats, oyster boats, barges, boats scooped out simple as a saucer – flat and shallow and so small that a cat could ride in one by himself.  Great boats gilded, decked, cushioned, studded, crimsoned, velveted, proud, pennants and flags flying.  Dragboats towing trees for timber, fishing boats, where a boy leant against the mast, arms waving, out over the waves and slop of the tidal river.

The water-craft came from every side, and down the middle too, so that there was no upriver and downriver, only a stream of boats, hugger-mugger, dodging one another, grazing one another, sometimes so close that a man putting a sausage to his mouth found he had fed the lady at the oars in the whelk boat next to him….’ – p5

‘…Silver had never driven a horse and cart in her life, but she took the reins, and the horse seemed to know how to go forward, and forward they went, out through the courtyard and into Dark House Lane and down towards the River Thames.

Stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, pudding dens, places where they stitched jerkins, made tallow candles, forged horses’ hooves, inns, taverns, bakers, cookshops, men and women with fish baskets on their heads, men and women alike smoking short clay pipes, dogs running in and out of cartwheels, a parrot on a perch shouting at passers-by, a woman selling bolts of cloth from a handcart, a tinker with pots and pans hung round his thin body, a fiddler playing a melody, a sheep in the middle of the pitted lane the smell of cooking, a pork smell, like roasting, and a smell like iron being heated so that it glowed.  A little boy with bare feet, a girl carrying a baby, a donkey with a man on its back – a man so tall that his feet tripped along the ground as the donkey plodded on.  Two soldiers, ragged and frightening, waved their fists at Silver, but she was brave, and urged the horse and cart on.  Then she came towards the river.  The River Thames, wide, like in a dream – jammed with craft and bodies, like in a nightmare.

Black boats that were the charcoal burners.  Boats tarred and blistering in the sun.  Boats smothered in pitch to keep the water out.  Boats sanded and oiled and curtained and secret to keep out prying eyes.  Rich boats like these, and poor boats like the others.  Boats that carried barrels of beer, and boats half sunk under the weight of cattle, mooing and lowing at the slopping water.

There were naval boats, proud in blue and gold, and merchant boats with their Guild insignia embossed into the prow.  There were scavenger boats trawling their nets to drag up what others had lost, and gaily painted boats carrying visitors to and fro.  There was a boat full of cats – so full of cats that the boat itself looked to be made out of fur.  These were ships’ cats coming ashore or going to sail, a mewling, rioting, spitting, sunning, tails-in-the-air-legs-akimbo of a boat, so noisy that a sloop packed with priests had their fingers in their ears, and the drunken party-goers sailing nearby nearly fell overboard for laughing.

And this was London.  And this was the life of London.  And this was the life of London rolled out like a carpet and played like a tune, and smelling to high heaven of fish and meat and animals and dung and sweat and beer and the hot scorching acrid smells of leather tanners and blacksmiths and the steam and hiss of water and flesh as the cattle were branded on the stumpy piers.

London, thought Silver. 1601.…’

[See Dickens' on the Thames with Pip and Magwitch.]