How to behave at School (300 years ago)

Good for when you are in role as a prehistoric or not so prehistoric teacher:

The School of Manners OR Rules for Childrens Behaviour: The Fourth Edition (1701)

CHAP. VII
Of Behaviour in the School
1 Bow at coming in, Putting off thine hat; expecially if the Mafter or Ufther be prefent.
2. Loiter not, but immediately take thine own feat…
6. At no time talk or quarrel in the school; but be quiet, peaceable and silent: Much less may thou deceive thy self by trifling away thy time in play.
7.  If thy Master speak to thee, rise up and bow, making thine answer standing.
8. Bawl not aloud in making complaints: A boys tongue should never be heard in school but in answering a question, or repeating his lesson.
9.  If a stranger speak to thee in School, stand up and answer with respect and ceremony, both of words and gesture, as if though spaketh to thy Master.
11. Go not rudely home through the street, stand not talking with boys to delay thee, but go quietly home, and with all convenient haste.
12. Divulge not to any person whatsoever elsewhere, any thing that hath passed in the School, either spoken or done.

Navigating the National Curriculum in English

Been poring over the Framework, Programmes of Study, Attainment Levels, Assessing pupils’ Progress, Assessment for Learning, Progression Maps and am whacked!  Ironically No1 daughter came home with an interim report for the end of term today.  Not one attainment level to be seen!  All grades for effort and attitude.  Now that’s inclusive.  SEAL related methinks?

R we too savage on spellin’?

In September we played a shoot ‘em up spelling game with difficult words and it reminded me of David Almond’s use of misspelling in ‘The Savage’.  Here’s a little bit – I loved the book – lots of pictures too!  It raises the question about whether spelling matters.  Almond manages to ensure that it is helpful in building a relationship between the reader and writer.  Normally the assumption is that spelling mistakes get in the way of the reader making sense of the text.  As the LINC report puts it “It is salutary to be aware of how strongly we can as readers (and teachers) be put off a piece of writing by misspellings.  This suggests a readiness to judge at a surface level only.  We must remember that our job as teachers is to foster and develop the whole of a pupil’s competence as a writer, not just ability as a speller…”

‘…You won’t believe this but it’s true.  I wrote a story called ‘The Savage’ about a savage kid that lived under the ruined chapel in Burgess Woods, and the kid came to life in the real world.

I wrote it soon after my dad died.  There was a counsellor at school called Mrs Molloy, that kep taking me out of lessons and telling me to write my thoughts and feelings down.  She said she wanted me to explore my grief and ’start to move forward’. I did try for a while, but it just seemed stupid, and it made me feel worse, so one day I ripped up all that stuff about myself, got an old notebook and started scribbling ‘The Savage’.  Here’s the first bit of it, and I know the spelling isn’t brilliant but I was younger then.

There was a wild kid living in Burgess Woods, I wrote .  He had no family and he had no pals and he didn’t know where he come from and he culdn’t  talk and he lived on beries and roots and rabbits and stuff like old pies that he pinched from the bins at the back of Greenacres Rest Home.  He lived in a cave under the rooined chapel.  His wepons were old kitchen nives and forks and an ax that he nicked from Franky Finigin’s alotment.

If anybody ever seen him he chased them and cort them and killed them and ate them and chucked their bones down an aynshent pit shaft.

He was savage.

He was truely wild.

Once I started writing the story, it was like I couldn’t stop, which was strange for me.  I’d never been one for stories.  I couldn’t stand all that stuff about wizards and fairies and ‘once upon a time’ and ‘they all lived happily ever after’.  That’s not what life’s like.  Me, I wanted blood and guts and adventures, so that’s what I wrote.  I set it all in our little town of Saltwell.  I didn’t show ‘The Savage’ to Mrs Molloy.  I didn’t show it to anybody.  It was my kind of story, just for myself…’

David Almond, “The Savage”, (2008), Walker Books, London, pp7-12

Speaking and Listening – Starter…

A draws something without showing B or C.  A then describes it to B without saying what she has drawn.  C listens.  B and C then draw what A has described to them.

I did this with some lawyers and they drew dogs but described cats or even a rabbit!  Sometimes very funny!  We used it show how a jury (which gets most of its information in spoken form) could easily get the wrong end of the stick!  The three way game represents A as the witness, B the lawyer and C the jury member.  It would work in an English class meeting Speaking and Listening ‘key processes’ in the Renewed Framework for English, or as a starter for a mock trial?

First paragraphs…start as you mean to go on?

Since this is my first paragraph here are a few of the opening paragraphs of texts we’ve been working with this term…I’ll think up some lesson ideas with them next.

…You can call me Link.  It’s not my name, but it’s what I say when anybody asks, which isn’t often.  I’m invisible, see?  One of the invisible people.  Right now I’m sitting in a doorway watching the passers-by.  They avoid looking at me.  They’re afraid I want something they’ve got, and they’re right.  Also they don’t want to think about me.  They don’t like reminding I exist.  Me, and those like me.  We’re living proof that everything’s not all right and we make the place untidy.//Hang about and I’ll tell you the story of my fascinating life…

They called him Moche the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life.  He was a man of all work at Hasidic synagogue.  …The Jews of Sighet – that little town in Transylvania where I spent my childhood – were very fond of him.  He was very poor and lived humbly.  Generally my fellow townspeople, though they would help the poor, were not particularly fond of them.  Moche the Beadle was the exception.  Nobody ever felt embarassed my him.  Nobody ever felt encumbered by his presence.  He was a past master in the art of making himself insignificant, of seeming invisible….

…My earliest memories are a confusion of hilly fields and dark, damp stables, and rats that scampered along the beams above my head.  But I remember well enough the day of the horse sale.  The terror of it stayed with me all my life…

…There was once in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.  It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue…

…She was scandalizin’ my name, She took my money, She called me honey, But she was scandalazin’ my name.  Called it love but was playin’ a game…(He gets up and moves the bucket.  Stands thinking for a moment then, raising his arms to hold an imaginary partner, he launches into an intricate ballroom dance step.  Although a mildly comic figure, he reveals a reasonable degree of accomplishment.)  Hey Sam. (Sam absorbed in the comic book, does not respond.)  Hey Boet Sam! (Sam looks up)  I’m getting it.  The quickstep.  Look now and tell me.  (He repeats the step.)  Well?…

…On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.  He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gently drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit.  “He was always dreaming about trees,” Placida Linero, his mother, told me twenty seven years later, recalling the details of that unpleasant Monday.  “The week before, he’d dreamed that he was alone in a tinfoil airplane and flying through the almond trees without bumping into anything,” she told me.  She had a well earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people’s dreams, provided  they were told her before eating, but she hadn’t noticed any ominous augury in those two dreams of her son’s, or in the other dreams of trees he’d told her about, the mornings preceding his death…

…It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried out bed of the old North Sea…

…There is a land beyond the forests.  A land so beautiful that as you stand at the edge of the trees and gaze across the pastures to the snow-brushed mountains, you know that heaven is surely but a step away.  From this land comes a song, and from the song comes a story.  A story of murder…

…EXCUSE ME SIR, but may I be of assistance?  Ah I see I have alarmed you.  Do not be frightened by my beard:  I am a lover of America.  I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services…

…MAY I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?  I fear you may not be able to make yourself understood by the worthy gorilla who presides over the fate of this establishment.  In fact he speaks nothing but Dutch.  Unless you authorise me to plead your case, he will not guess you want gin.  There, I dare hope he understood me; that nod must mean that he yields to my arguments.  He’s on the move; indeed, he is making haste with a sort of careful deliberateness.  You are lucky; he didn’t grunt.  When he refuses to serve someone, he merely grunts.  No one insists.  Being a master of one’s moods is the privelege of the larger animals.  Now I shall withdraw, Monsieur, happy to have been of help to you.  Thank you; I’d accept if were sure of not being a nuisance.  You are too kind.  Then I shall bring my glass over beside yours…

…They’d stolen a march on the day.  The sky was like dark glass, reluctant to let the light through.  The only sound was the chudder of the van skirting the lough.  The surface of the water was colourless.  The hills slumped down on the far side like silhouettes of snoozing giants…

…The minicab office was up a cobbled mews with little flat houses either side.  That’s where I first met Violet Park, what was left of her.  There was a healing centre next door – a pretty smart name for a place with a battered brown door and no proper door handle and stuck on wooden numbers in the shape of clowns.  The 3 of number 13 was a w stuck on sideways and I thought it was kind of sad and I liked it at the same time…