Johnfrom'south! wrote:
nic_deane wrote:
I teach ballads (poetry) and ballads (song) next to each other, Nick Cave (Lime Tree Arbour)
thats a beautiful song - i wish we had had teachers like you, i remmeber the selections for GCSE poetry being awful when we did it... and if you start taking the kids lady solitude thats even better - lucky little sods
Most of the material is actually not that bad (see Carol Ann Duffy on necrophilia, or the poem in which Shakespeare goes down on Ann Hathaway). Poems like that generally elicit a good response. No, it's teaching to the exam that makes it a bore:
STUDENT X: Miss, aren't we gonna do something fun today?
ME: Don't be daft! This is English-and your GCSE's in 4 weeks and we still haven't covered blah blah blah & blah....so let's do some annotation, eh?
CLASS: [groans]
ME: [groans on the inside]
Teaching Music & Poetry like that's a luxury (it shouldn't be) & this does my effing nut. Will stop now before this turns into War & Peace...
it is the teaching to the exam that kills all kinds of things, but luckily i didnt used to go to school all that much by the time of GCSEs so i escaped the worst of it.
if i remember rightly carol ann duffy was in our anothology and i would have prefered her to the simon armitage we ended up with doing. i didnt like him then and i dont like him now. i managed to bullshit my way through it ok though.
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