Tough to Teach

Zero to hero

AQA’s English Language GCSE is generally regarded as being a tricky exam to prepare students for, with many finding Question 3 of Language Paper 1 a particular bugbear to respond to. So much so, in fact, I’ve heard from several Year 11 students recently who opted to skip this question entirely in their mock exam, happy to forfeit the 8 marks so they could re-invest their time on the paper’s other questions.

How has it come to this?

The mark scheme for Question 3 states that students are asked to analyse ‘the effects of a writer’s choice of structure’. As a guide, AQA recommends students to consider some key questions of the text, including:

1. When I first start to read the text, what is the writer focusing my attention on?

2. How is this being developed?

3. What feature of structure is evident at this point?

4. Why might the writer have deliberately chosen to begin the text with this focus and therefore make use of this particular feature of structure?

This is all very well, until we get to that fourth question. Generally, I can get students to notice one thing changing to another thing. But the moment the wheels come off is when I ask a class ‘Why is it interesting?’ ‘Why might the writer have done that?

More often than not, I’m met with blank faces.

I too have found myself making impressive cognitive leaps in the classroom to arrive at something interesting to say about the sudden shift from, say, description to dialogue or why the writing describes a broad panoramic landscape and then settles on some minute description. It’s really hard to think of something reasonable to say and can feel very much like, well, guessing.

Many generous folks on Twitter/X have painstakingly made resources to help teachers get theirs heads around this question. A simple search will reveal dozens. One good example even comes from AQA itself in this ‘Further Insight Series’ document that provides some concrete examples of what an examiner would look for: https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/english/AQA-87001-Q3-FI-HSA.PDF

It includes a top-level, full-mark response using an extract from the novel City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende, a copy of which can be found here: Paper_1_insert_Alex_.pdf (oasisacademybrightstowe.org).

Here is the model response provided by AQA to demonstrate the sort of answer that would get full marks:

The text focuses on a character called Alex Cold, and the reader get to see him from two different angles. At the beginning he is alone in his bedroom and waking up from a nightmare where his mother was carried off by ‘an enormous black bird’. Then in the second half of the text the writers changes the focus to Alex being with the rest of the family downstairs at breakfast time. He is snappy with his sisters when Andrea says ‘Mamma’s going to die’. This links the two halves of the text together because the fear Alex experiences in the earlier nightmare is now manifested at the breakfast table. Shouting at his sisters makes it seem as if he disagrees with her, but because the reader has already has an insight into Alex’s subconcious mind, we understand at the this point that really it’s the opposite. He shouts at his sister because secretly he fears what she is saying is true and his mother might really die.

In the final two paragraphs we are deliberately presented with a direct contrast between Alex’s parents. First, the focus narrows from the whole family onto Alex’s father, who is struggling to look after the children. There is nothing in the refrigerator but orange juice and they are living on takeaway food. Then the final paragraph zooms in on both then and now versions of the mother. It begins with the sentence ‘Alex had realised during those months how enormous their mother’s presence had been and how painful her absence was now’. This structure is effective because by first showing how inadequate his father is, even though it’s not his fault, it therefore emphasises how wonderful the mother is, or at least used to be. In a way, this also make me re-evaluate the nightmare at the beginning  because we have seen for ourselves the close bond between Alex and his mother and now understand why it ‘startled’ him so much and why he experienced ‘pounding in his heart’, a physical reaction to the fear of losing her.

How structure is assessed, Paper 1, Question 3 , Further insight series, AQA

This model response picks up on shifts in focus, then contrasting characters, and finally a noticeable shift from the beginning to the ending.

What this model answer appears to suggest is that the extract is to be read and understood in a vacuum, as if all the information a students needs to draw from is written on the page in front of them. An issue with this, as far as I can see, is that no single structural feature is ever really all that inherently interesting. Structure itself does not really create meaning, but can become of interest in the way it works in conversation with the wider traditions of storytelling.

As E. D. Hirsch attests to in his book Cultural Literacy ‘to grasp the words on the page we have to know a lot of information that isn’t set down on the page’.

My gripe with the example provided by AQA is that it does not appear to be addressing anything to do with the tradition of storytelling structures, encouraging (it seems to me) an analysis of the structure using only what is set down on the page – a frustrating task, as this isn’t what skilled readers do.

Alex Quigley, in a 2022 blog post titled ‘Developing Skilled Readers’ argues: “knowledge of stories, and their structures, complex patterns of characters, themes, and language […] proves vital to the entire story. As such, the ability of pupils to make meaningful predictions, and to comprehend what they read, rests upon a sea of background knowledge.”

What background knowledge might help?

In order for students to be ‘skilled readers’, as Quigley says, they could be taught typical story structures, such as Christopher Booker’s ‘Seven Basic Plots’, summed up nicely here: Story Archetypes: How to Recognize the 7 Basic Plots – 2024 – MasterClass.

To make matters slightly simpler, these archetypes are (broadly-speaking) variations of the so-called ‘hero’s journey’ storytelling structure, set out in Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (a detailed explanation of which can be found here: The 12 Steps of the Hero’s Journey, With Example | Grammarly)

Students will often already have an understanding of these structures seeing as how they underpin big franchises like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games or Star Wars. That said, students may not be entirely clear how, so explicit teaching of what the hero’s journey is and how writers play with it in interesting ways is important.

Bearing this backgound knowledge in mind, then, here is a response I wrote to the same question, imagining what a student with working knowledge of the hero’s journey might say:

The story of Alex Cold appears to borrow strikingly from the storytelling archetype ‘the hero’s journey’, opening with what appears to be the story’s main conflict: the character of Alex Cold needing to heroically overcome a monster in the form of an ‘enormous black bird’, a figurative representation of his mother’s death. By presenting not only the monstrous bird in the dream, but also a setting filled with ‘shattered glass’ the encounter between Alex, as the story’s hero, and this monster, takes place in the suitably uncanny setting of a dream. Here, interestingly, it suggests that Alex is poised between two states: on the one hand he is still firmly at home, his dream taking place in the relatively familiar setting of his family’s ‘house’, the monster too taking the familiar form of a ‘bird’. However, he is crossing a threshold into an unknown world – his home’s window being ‘shattered’, the bird is ‘enormous’, the ocean ‘roars’. In this sense we are being presented with Alex arguably in a state of limbo, refusing the heroic call due to what appears to be fear.

Alex then wakes from the dream to a ‘large dog sleeping beside him’ a place of comforting familiarity. But this too appears uncanny as if Alex is still ‘tangled in the images of his bad dream’. The family eat breakfast, but pancakes, a homely staple, now seem strange ‘like rubber-tyre tortillas’. Likewise, the other characters of Alex’s family, a symbol of order, are in a state of chaos, ‘shriek[ing]’ at one other only to be ‘interruped, without much conviction’ by their father.

The extract concludes with a memory of the more orderly past, a ‘house immaculate’, serving as an insight into the potential reward that will come once Alex finds the bravery to come to terms with his mother’s death. There is the impression that Alex will achieve this, as foreshadowed by this memory, but to do so he must face the monstrous challenge head on so that he can benefit not only himself, but also his family, who will altogether be transformed back to a state of order by this experience.

Like the example provided by AQA, I too have worked through the extract chronologically, concentrating on shifts in focus. The difference being that by looking at the text through the mental model of the hero’s journey, I can see that the writer’s structural choices are a consequence of them playing with a storytelling tradition, a far interesting means of reading the text than just looking shifts from one thing to another for the effect of emphasis.

Armed with this knowledge, the exam question becomes a clearer, more straightforward task that students can actually study for, and – significantly – an opportunity of them to actually grapple with the disciplinary knowledge of the subject.

Explicit teaching of storytelling structures, like the hero’s journey, would ideally happen at Key Stage 3, and not left until Key Stage 4. I have seen some wonderful curriculums that aim to embed this sort of knowledge early on in secondary school, such as the OAT English curriculum project: OAT English (ormistonacademiestrust.co.uk)

I’ve been teaching the ‘hero’s journey’ to my students recently who I daresay have found it fascinating. They have enjoyed unpicking stories they have known for many years, but weren’t aware of how they converse with a tried and true storytelling archetype. And they have found it working away in the background of our literature texts too: Macbeth, An Inspector Calls, Jekyll and Hyde, even some of the Love & Relationships poetry, enabling them to offer fascinating new interpretations.

For an English teacher, at least, what could be more interesting than that?

Layman’s term

When I began teaching English I realised, much to my horror, that despite the tens of thousands of hours of English instruction I had received over my lifetime, and although I considered myself fairly ‘well-read’, I just didn’t know enough to teach it well.

The reading I began to do as a fledgling English teacher confirmed this shameful suspicion: there were (and still are) plenty of concepts within English where I am still firmly a layman, whereby neither my schooling, parents, extended family, neighbours, friends, television, newspapers, nor undergraduate university education provided me with even a crumb of understanding.

Plenty has been written about the role of knowledge in the curriculum over the past decade – that it is not sufficient for knowledge to be inherently interesting by virtue of just existing, but must be ‘powerful knowledge’, helping to reveal meaning beyond the text in hand to include other texts which may be experienced in the future. In practical terms, it means I should not just teach Romeo and Juliet, let’s say, but use that text as a vehicle for learning about broader concepts so that students may better understand other texts (Shakespeare or otherwise) they encounter in the future. It is what the cognitive scientist Professor Stephen Pinker refers to when writing ‘the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the web: They might as well not exist.’

My desperate attempt in recent years at becoming a better English teacher has seen me play ‘conceptual catch-up’. Teaching some of The Canterbury Tales to Year 8 this year, I struggled to put my finger on what it was exactly that I should teach beyond the characters and plot. What conceptual fabric could I unpick so my students might better understand English more as a discipline?

Swiftly failing to arrive at an answer, I deferred to the greater mind of David Wallace, a former President of the New Chaucer Society who, thankfully for me, authored An Oxford Short Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer (the Oxford Short Introduction books, if you’re not familiar, are brilliantly accessible routes into a variety of subjects. I intend to read as many as I can before I die).

It was here I stumbled across liminality, a concept that has subsequently helped me better understand not only The Canterbury Tales, but all the texts I teach across the curriculum. Liminality is one such Pinker-esque ‘conceptual fabric’ I wish I had explicitly known sooner.

What is it?

Liminality stems from the Latin word ‘Limen’ meaning ‘a threshold’. It was originally coined in 1909 as an anthropological term by Arnold van Gennep to describe a rite of passage, such as an initiation, in which the participant breaks from a previous practice, passes through a threshold before being re-incorporated with a new identity. A typical example seen in most cultures is such as a graduation ceremony in which an individual passes from childhood to adulthood. For the duration of the ceremony they are neither child nor adult, but at a liminal point between the two. Liminality does not just apply to individuals or brief moments, but can expand to include groups or even whole societies over long periods of time (such as a war or a revolution).

How might it apply to English?

In his Short Introduction…, David Wallace explains that there are many kinds of limen to be found in Chaucer […] new thresholds may arise at any moment of reading: suddenly the membrane thins between this world and some other.’ In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer presents physical borders that signal the onset of a supernatural encounter, a doorway to a supernatural world, often between life and death/earth and heaven. In The Miller’s Tale, for example, John the old carpenter sees his lodger Nicholas speaking protective prayers ‘on the threshhfold of the dore withoute’. Likewise, in The Pardoner’s Tale the three men encounter the old man, a person on the boundary of his own mortality, at a stile connecting one open field with another.

Once I understood this concept, I began to suddenly notice it all around. It is the very stuff of literature: the balancing act which builds tension. Hamlet, for instance, famously ponders neither whether solely ‘to be’ nor ‘not to be’, but both simultaneously. In the play he exists at a point between life and death, that liminal state established by his father’s ghost (a liminal being, no less) in the opening scene.

Macbeth has the Porter, who pretends to be the porter of hell-gate, a dwelling on the limen between life and death; salvation and damnation. The porter character appears as genius loci, the defining spirit of the place (Macbeth’s castle/Scotland/the cosmos?) straddling the play’s themes, themselves dualities: truth and deception/good and evil/nature and the supernatural/ambition and apathy etc.

In A Christmas Carol Scrooge’s redemption takes place in a realistic Victorian London, but one that is also very much inhabited by supernatural spirits.

Frankenstein’s creature is of course both dead and alive.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is indeed ‘strange’ precisely because that novel is about liminality – that ‘man is not one, but two’. Reminiscent of Chaucer’s wooden country stile, Stevenson’s novel is filled with various doorways, a motif which connotes that a transition is in occurrence  – that our understanding of human nature was changing.

In fact, the Gothic movement broadly dwells in liminality: notions such as the sublime (to be in awe of something and yet be terrified by it) or the uncanny (to find something familiar, but also strange) are liminal ideas.

Lord of the Flies depicts boys who, in order to survive their stranding on a deserted island, organise themselves into a state somewhere between childhood and adulthood.

Poetry also relies on liminal tension. Carol Ann Duffy’s Before You Were Mine (chosen at random – it has been on my mind since it was in this year’s AQA GCSE Literature exam paper), uses the ghostly image of her mother ‘clatter[ing] towards [her]’ (no doubt, now I think about it, a nod to Shakespeare’s Hamlet) to stress how the feelings for her late mother are not singularly simple, but complex: somewhere in that liminal point between adoration and disappointment.

And let’s not forget the uncomfortable bed-fellow of English: non-fiction. One reason the Victorians especially are so fascinating is that study of their writing reveals a complex worldview. The Victorians struggled to come to terms with themselves and their achievements, an uneasy blend of pride and shame. Henry Mayhew (1812 –1887), an English journalist, described this in 1850 whilst describing London in a letter:

‘It was utterly unlike London as seen every day below, in all its bricken and hard-featured reality; it was rather the phantasm – the spectral illusion, as it were, of the great metropolis – such as one might see it in a dream, with here and there stately churches and palatial hospitals, shimmering like white marble, their windows glittering in the sunshine like plates of burnished gold – while the rest of the scene was all hazy and indefinite.’

Henry Mayhew

Here are two visions of London. On the one hand, Mayhew seems to speak with pride of the idyllic ‘great metropolis’ of ‘stately churches and palatial hospitals’, but this is also blended with a description of the city as a ‘phantasm […] all hazy and indefinite’ suggesting perhaps that this picturesque view of London is indeed an unreliable fantasy. Given that Mayhew was writing at a time when Londoners were dying in their thousands of an outbreak of Cholera, partly due to the terrible living conditions inflicted upon the city’s poorest, Mayhew wisely catches himself from believing his own hyped-up view of the city.

(These are but a few examples – I could go on).

Why is it important to know?

Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald Professor Sophie Gee wrote an opinion piece in defence of studying English and the humanities at university. Her argument, summed up, is that reading and writing are skills for ‘working with disorderly, contradictory points of view and colliding imaginative ideas’, that ‘texts and works of art thrive on ideas that are contradictory and true at the same time.’

Barbara Bleiman, an education consultant at the English and Media Centre (EMC), writes in a 2020 blog post titled ‘Texts That Talk to Each Other’ that ‘every text is entering a dialogue with past literature’, that ‘Reading any text is a deeply intertextual act.’ The act of reading, she appears to say, is itself a liminal act.

And is it not the case that to read literature is to find ourselves poised between two worlds of meaning – the literal and the metaphorical?

Being explicitly clear to students that English studies operates in this liminal realm and to encourage them to look for this uneasy balance of ideas has resulted in deeper, more interesting analyses of texts in my lessons. Just last week I asked my Year 8s to take their initial thesis about an extract from Roald Dahl’s autobiography Boy: Tales of Childhood: their accurate, but basic interpretation that ‘Dahl’s schooling was miserable’ – and to make it more sophisticated by phrasing it as a liminality. After some thought we eventually arrived at the idea that while Dahl does indeed write about the misery of his schooldays, what makes this book of greater interest is that we read it with an anticipation of childhood innocence. Dahl being caned by the headmaster stings all the more because such brutality is the polar opposite of what we think a childhood should be.

But knowledge of limen offers something more that goes beyond good essay writing. My students, when studying poetry, have more than once asked, ‘how can anyone feel contrasting emotions at the same time?’ It’s a logical question. And I sometimes feel they realise the answer immediately after asking because – when we really think about it – is this not the very nature of the relationships that we experience: competing feelings of love and despair, frustration and joy that never neatly resolve themselves?

Truly knowing one another, perhaps, is to be sat in that limen (whether we know it or not).

(Dun) smoke and mirrors

Whenever I introduce Lady Macbeth to a class it is just a matter of moments before a student will ask, ‘Sir – what’s Lady Macbeth’s first name?’

And when I respond that she doesn’t have one, she is just known as Lady Macbeth, they inevitably then ask: ‘Why?’

It’s a question I’ve not always had a satisfying response to. The best I could do in the past was to explain that her lack of a first name is likely to be a consequence of the inferior status of women in Jacobean and medieval Scottish society – she is Macbeth’s wife, and that’s all that mattered – her status in relation to her husband, Macbeth.

But this of course misses the very point of Lady Macbeth who, as a literary character, is primarily a vehicle for meaning, and does not necessarily represent a person at all – a common misunderstanding students of literature (and teachers) can run into.

This very notion that characters are representations – not of people, but ideas – came to mind recently whilst reading some of Matthieu Pageau’s book The Language of Creation in which he challenges a materialist view of the bible, instead exploring the fascinating symbolism at work in its stories.

It reminded me of Lady Macbeth in particular. And while considering Shakespeare’s allusion to Genesis in Macbeth is nothing new, what with its theme of betrayal and its striking serpent imagery, it is interesting to see how such allusions help us understand the role of Lady Macbeth symbolically.

What is the significance of Adam and Eve in the biblical story of Genesis?

Adam’s main task in the Garden of Eden is to name the animals created by God. In this sense, Adam is a pair of eyes to observe and define the world. A profound point to note is that while Adam can survey all that is around him, he does not have the vantage to observe himself.

Eve is created by God as a peer to observe Adam in order that he may have an awareness, not just of the creatures that surround him, but also of himself. In this way, Eve represents a form of feedback, like a mirror.

When considering how this story is set in paradise (by definition, a place in which all of one’s needs are met) Eve’s function here as a second pair of eyes – a means for Adam to understand the truth about himself – is presented as being of fundamental necessity.

The significance of this role is underlined even further when Eve departs from Adam to tend to the Garden of Eden alone. This separation leaves her vulnerable to Satan who persuades her, as a further act of independence from Adam, to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The fall of man, therefore, is a direct consequence of Eve’s abandonment of her role as observer.

How is this like the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?

Much like Eve, Lady Macbeth symbolises a mirror that Macbeth may – upon reflection – see himself as he truly is, warts and all. Her name, ‘Lady Macbeth’ implies such doubling.

But unlike the Garden of Eden, medieval Scotland is no paradise. It is set after the fall of man and Eve’s abandonment of her role as provider of truth. As a ‘mirror’, Lady Macbeth is not an entirely identical reflection of Macbeth, then, but like a literal mirror, provides Macbeth with an unfortunately inverted view of himself.

The ‘back to front’ nature of her character brings to mind the witches’ utterance in Scene 1: ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’. The play’s famous line does not simply repeat ‘Fair is foul’ but inverts its grammar so it is heard backwards, a form of antimetabole.

It is written into the language that Macbeth – as is all mankind, according to the story of Genesis – doomed to be misled by feedback that opposes what is true.

How is Lady Macbeth an inversion of Macbeth?

The most obvious of Lady Macbeth’s inversions is of course her sex: Lady Macbeth is a female character, an inversion of Macbeth as male. But her gender is back to front too: Lady Macbeth is typically masculine (her courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness) while Macbeth is typically feminine (his cowardice, dependence, spectatorship, and weakness). As he admits to himself in Act 1 Scene 7 he has ‘no spur to prick the sides of [his] intent’ – privately a rather pathetic figure, standing in stark contrast to his more public reputation as ‘brave Macbeth’).

Soon after, however, when confronted by Lady Macbeth’s masculinity, Macbeth sees in her an inverted view of his true cowardly self, someone who may ‘[dare] do all that may become a man’. It is this which brings about the play’s major complication, as it was for Adam – the temptation to misunderstand one’s true self and give in to falsehood.

Is anyone telling the truth?

The ‘golden opinions’ of Macbeth’s prowess in battle, heralded in the Captain’s speech, are feverish, fantastical, and unreliable as a result. Their ‘golden’ colour, suggesting light, lack substance.

As with Malcolm’s waffly description of the Thane of Cawdor’s execution – which he did not witness himself, but insists unconvincingly that he ‘spoke with one that saw him die’ – the Captain and Malcolm, alongside all the noblemen, are not telling Duncan the whole truth.

Rather, as summarised by the Porter in Act 2, everyone is an ‘equivocator’: speaking ambiguously to keep the truth concealed. It is precisely this issue Duncan himself describes when he laments that ‘there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.’

What is Shakespeare saying more broadly?

In Hamlet, which Shakespeare wrote around 1599, just a few years before Macbeth, the Prince of Denmark states that the moral purpose of theatre is to ‘hold a mirror up to nature’. When instructing the players who will be performing for his stepfather, in Act 3 Scene 2, Hamlet tells them to:

‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature:
for any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose
end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the
mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure.’

Act 3 Scene 2, Hamlet

Here, Hamlet echoes classical authors, who insisted that drama be a form of truth, not frivolous entertainment. Playwrights and players should strive to present action that is true to life, without exaggeration or distortion, without bombast or excessive sentimentality.

In this ‘theatrical mirror’ we see our virtues and vices reflected back at us in their true shape: such is the theatre’s moral function.

Noticeably, a similar idea is dismissed by Macbeth at the play’s end once he hears of Lady Macbeth’s death, the ultimate abandonment. His is the view that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. But this is cynical, sentimental, and consequently rings false. The theatre’s moral function, to reflect us back to ourselves, is out of kilter here: the player is ‘poor’, strutting and fretting immodestly. The imagery of darkness, of shadows and extinguishing candles, imply how Macbeth’s demise is now down to his inability to see any truth at all: neither of himself nor his surroundings.

As with Adam, Macbeth’s terrible fate is a consequence of the flawed feedback loop that curses all humankind after the fall. The play is highlighting the absolute importance of seeing clearly, but also warns us not to be too hopeful.

Beyond everything, we never get this sort of thing right. Such is our curse. 

Heroes and Monsters

I’ve been revising An Inspector Calls with my Year 11 class recently, as well as teaching it to my Year 10s, leading to me to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the play.

One of the challenges I find when analysing modern drama is that, unlike Shakespeare, its meaningful images are few and far between. It’s for this reason that students are commonly steered towards Inspector Goole’s parting speech; it finally provides something students can get their teeth stuck into: the ‘millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths’ and his warning of ‘fire and blood and anguish’ – powerful and accessible images the majority of students can write about at length.

But recently we were reading Mr Birling’s speech in Act One in which he advises the younger men, Gerald and Eric, to ‘make their own way in the world’. I’ve often found it hard to know what to say about that much beyond it presenting Mr Birling as a character advocating individualism.

For the first time, though, this line struck me as rather heroic in tone, bringing to mind a solitary individual embarking on a journey down a road – the ‘way’ – their gaze fixed on the horizon: an image perhaps of Joseph Campbell’s so-called ‘monomyth’, the ‘hero’s journey’.

Mr Birling, then, is arguably boasting about what he perceives to be his own heroism, how his successful journey to seek out wealth and status was actually a hero’s search for treasure.

The Odyssey

But Mr Birling, of course, is no hero. He exhibits a partial blindness to his environment: the suffering of his workers and the ‘blood, fire and anguish’ of the immediate future. Not so much a hero, then, but a monster: the Cyclopes, whose sole central eye provides a short-sighted, blinkered view of the world.

In Book 9 of The Odyssey, Homer describes the Cyclopes as:

‘an overweening and lawless folk, who, trusting in the immortal gods, plant nothing with their hands nor plough; but all these things spring up for them without sowing or ploughing, wheat, and barley, and vines, which bear the rich clusters of wine, and the rain of Zeus gives them increase.

Neither assemblies for council have they, nor appointed laws, but they dwell on the peaks of lofty mountains in hollow caves.’

If this isn’t a description of the Edwardian Capital class, I don’t know what is: the immortal gods are the upper class, who Mr Birling worships, because they provide for him. He produces nothing himself, and yet textiles pour out of his factory thanks to the efforts of the working class, allowing him to enjoy the port wine (‘Giving us  the port, Edna?’).

Mr Birling enjoys the ‘heavily comfortable’ privileges of his position (the lofty mountains), yet he resides in a home that is ‘not cosy and homelike’ (the hollow cave).

It made me wonder whether there was any further mileage in considering heroism and mythology in the play.

Spurred on by my sceptical Year 11s (‘I don’t think Priestley meant that, Sir!’), I’ve recently taken a look at Priestley’s catalogue to see whether this may have been intentional. It turns out that Priestley wrote the libretto to an opera, first performed in 1949, titled The Olympians.

Set in France in 1836, the opera presents the story of the Gods of Olympus who become a group of strolling players when men cease to believe in them. At midsummer they find themselves again to have divine powers.

Priestley, it seems, was thinking about Greek mythology around the time he wrote An Inspector Calls.

So, what other mythological allusions can be drawn? Here are three more I’ve found:

Titanomachy

Mr Birling enthuses over his friend’s upcoming journey on ‘this new liner – The Titanic’, a name derived from the Titans of Greek mythology. In this ancient myth, the Titans are a tribe of giant gods. Their parents were the earth and sky and they were the first race on earth to have human form. They possessed gigantic force: brute strength. But they were in conflict with a new race called the Olympians, who had intelligence, beauty and skill. Despite their massive strength the Titans go under.

The myth is a warning against what the Greeks called hubris – the dangers of overconfidence – and it is no coincidence that this is also what An Inspector Calls is about. The Edwardian upper class, who ruled with great strength, brutalised the working class (women particularly), but were consequently doomed, like the mythological Titans, to fall to a new (more Socialist) order that valued kindness, intellect, and skill. Historically, this was true: workers went on strike, women demanded the vote, and Clement Atlee was elected prime minister.

The exciting benefit of using this myth as a ‘lens’ through which to view the play is that it creates new meaning that may have not been previously perceived. The upper class in the play appear human, but they are not fully – they are humanoid, and like the Titans, rather primitive in comparison to the new order Olympians.

Further to this, we can also look to epic poetry to make meaning in An Inspector Calls. Like the Titan myth, these are an ancient set of texts that are heroic in tone. They depict the building of civilization by heroism and the domestication of the savage legacy in our human nature, marking the birth of community; a nation.

Beowulf

Beowulf is an English epic poem probably composed in the 8th Century.

The hero, a warrior called Beowulf, slays the monsters (Grendal and his mother) who emerge from a lake at night to eat any human they can find.

By defeating Grendal, Beowulf saves human civilization from destruction by monsters; a civilization no longer being brutalised by monsters goes on to flourish – it becomes us.

When looking through the lens of this epic poem, the Birling family and Gerald Croft are representative of such monsters at the beginning of the play. Like Grendal and his mother in Beowulf they use people to sustain their monstrous selves through brutal exploitation. In Gerald’s case, especially, he describes the ‘Eva’ he had an affair with as being ‘young and fresh’, that last adjective being reminiscent of food. The other women at the Palace Theatre bar are likewise ‘dough-faced […] tarts’.

Beowulf, the hero, is represented by Sheila and Eric.

Sheila bravely turns on Gerald, breaking off their engagement; no small act, given the seismic consequence it has for Mr Birling’s intended business affairs.

Eric, initially timid, finds his voice and confronts his father head on. No longer a figure of foolishness, Eric adopts a tone of kindness and intellect, recognising that ‘we all helped kill her’.  

With a new generation behaving more heroically by the play’s close, the future of the nation as a community appears to be in safe hands, and in true epic fashion, a greater Britain can be established – precisely what Priestly wanted.

The present is indebted to the heroism of the past, fostering a sense of national pride.

The Iliad

Another epic poem to read alongside An Inspector Calls is Homer’s The Iliad. In this story a beautiful Greek woman, Helen, elopes with a foreign prince, Paris, who then takes her home to Troy.

Helen, however, is already married which causes a clash between Greece and Troy.

For our purposes, I would posit that Ancient Greece (itself a coalition, significantly) could represent Socialism; and Troy, Edwardian Capitalism.

Rather than attack them head-on, the Greek’s cleverly construct a beautiful wooden horse which they leave at the gates of Troy, but not before hiding some of their most elite Spartan soldiers inside. The Trojans assume victory, presume the horse a peace-offering, and take it inside their walls.

Inspector Goole (not a real police inspector, but in the guise of one) infiltrates the conscience of the Birling family much like the wooden horse infiltrates the walls of Troy. And when Mr Birling, Mrs Birling and Gerald Croft mistakenly think they have been victorious, discovering there is no Inspector Goole, they celebrate (‘Have a drink, Gerald’), only to be stung in the play’s closing lines.

Likewise, Troy, seeing the Greek ships depart and the peace offering of a wooden horse, lay down their arms to celebrate, only to be murdered by the skilful Spartans awaiting within.  

Troy took what did not rightfully belong to it: Helen, a wife of Greece. The Birlings, too, took what was not theirs: more than their fair share.

Troy is eventually burnt to the ground and from those ashes, Ancient Greece rises up to define world history – democracy and our way of life in the west.

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Reading texts, like An Inspector Calls, through the lens of mythological allusion is a fascinating way of unearthing deeper, richer and more nuanced meaning.

Helpful, especially when analysing a text that is as heavy-handed as Priestley’s play sometimes is.

2021 was a watershed year for me as a teacher.

That sounds terribly boastful, so let me add some much-needed humility: for most of my brief career lessons have felt like a frustrating hodgepodge of seemingly random tasks, techniques, and approaches. They have felt overly cumbersome, like being handed a heavily shuffled Rubik’s cube.

But 2021 was the year I took greater strides towards teaching properly – the mess of previous years’ fumblings now fully-formed into bold blocks of colour.

What, then, do I intend to do in 2022? More of what I did in 2021:

Read around my subject

Last year I began to follow lots of other teachers on Twitter. One unintended consequence of this were the frequent recommendations of good books I could be reading; a ready-made reading list for up-and-coming teachers like myself.

Teachers, like everyone on social media, largely present themselves on Twitter in a shiny positive light. What they choose to reveal about their teaching practice is often (but not always) a reel of highlights from their day: here is a clever thought I’ve had; here is a great resource I’ve made; here is how I handled a tricky situation brilliantly.

What’s great about that is it creates the impression that there is an army of outrageously competent teachers out there (and who am I to say there isn’t?).

This impression elevated my aspirations to a degree higher than they might have been were I only to look at my immediate circle of fallible real-life colleagues. These Twitter teachers inspired me to be better, to want to know more. And so in 2021 I dutifully read more books, blogs, and twitter threads, (partly as a way of keeping up with the @Joneses).

By reading around my subject more I have become a much more effective speaker in the classroom. I can explain concepts better simply because I know more; I can confidently connect the dots together in my mind, talking uninhibited about a topic. I have become the hallowed ‘expert in the room’ whose gravitas makes (most) students sit up and listen.

Why does speaking knowledgably have such power? In part because you can’t fake having subject knowledge. It’s hard won, from the arduous work that reading can sometimes be.

The expectation that teachers have this knowledge in abundance is largely why having an undergraduate level of education is still the minimum expectation.

But even being in possession of a degree, it is hard to really be sure what any teacher knows or doesn’t know. There is not a subject knowledge test you need to pass. Some teachers simply know a lot more (and some a lot less) than others.

With English studies especially there is a question mark hanging over us: what on earth are we expected to teach? David Didau highlights this problem in his latest book Making Meaning in English. He writes ‘one of the difficulties for English teachers […] is that there is surprisingly little substantive knowledge which we agree must be taught. Shakespeare plays are about as close as we get.’

The problem goes further. Beyond reading these texts with students it is not always obvious what we expect students to know about them at the end of a term. Two classes can spend six weeks studying the same play and learn vastly different things about it.

It was only until I did some further reading around the texts I’m expected to teach, did I really know what content I could be delivering.  This has made my recent lessons a richer experience for myself, as well as the students I teach.

But oddly it was down to me to do this reading, often outside of school. I have not yet worked in a school where this reading is provided, nor is appropriate time set aside to do it. It all feels very much like an optional extra, and it really shouldn’t be.

Plan lessons that focus on sharing knowledge, not making loads of resources

A handful of years ago my understanding of ‘lesson planning’ was synonymous with ‘creating dozens of Powerpoint slides’. I did this for years and no one ever told me otherwise (largely I suspect because they were all doing it too). There was some hushed talk about teaching without, but this was spoken about in the same manner that one might talk about barefoot marathoners – seemingly plausible, arguably beneficial, although no-one knew anyone who actually did it.

The issue with all this resource creation is that it was outrageously time-consuming. A five-period day could (for me, at least) consist of up to three hours ‘planning’ the night before. Why did I do it? Well, I was driven by worry; concerned with keeping the students busy for fear that if they found themselves disengaged for even a minute they would start flipping over the desks.

A lot of my lessons in 2021 have been stripped right back. I will put a task on the board for when the students enter the room (a retrieval task, usually, or perhaps a question that would lead into the topic of the lesson). After that though, the floor’s mine. I’ll explain what we’re going to learn about and then explain to the class what I want them to know.  Within this there will be questions to check understanding, of course, but a lot of it is me unashamedly talking. One great aspect of this is that the student’s attention is not distracted by anything on the board behind me because, well, there often isn’t anything there. It’s liberating to not feel compelled to step aside for fear of blocking the Comic Sans.

And when I’ve finished explaining a concept and I’m confident most get it, I’ll then do some writing under a visualiser, usually starting with an example. I’ll (once again) talk through it or, if this is not entirely new to them, I’ll do an example with their input to see what they know and whether there are any misunderstandings.

Modelling live requires little preparation time. What time I do spend on planning is used to work through in my mind, or on a scrap of paper, what it is that I want students to know, and how I’m going to show it to them. Sometimes I’ll practice the modelling beforehand if I worry I’ll get stuck, although often that will spoil the spontaneity of writing something live, which is truly what I want to get across.

It’s important to stress that this only ever works when you have the knowledge to share, and that’s the hardest part of all. I now believe that lesson planning should be mostly spent acquiring the necessary knowledge yourself so that you’re able to dispense it to students.

It is for this reason I cannot roll into school and successfully teach a Science cover lesson on plant cell structure to Year 10, despite being emailed detailed Powerpoint slides to work with (believe me, I once tried).

Solve students’ problems

By signposting what a lesson will be about

Have you ever had students, when they arrive in the classroom, ask ‘Sir, what are we doing today?’

Since they seem to have a real eagerness to know exactly what they’ll be doing the sooner I can explain that, the sooner they ease into the lesson.

So once my students have written down the title, date and had a go at the task on the board when they come in, I’ll explain: Right, what we’re going to do today is….’.

I’m not sure why I started opening lessons with an explanation of the lesson’s aim (maybe because they kept asking…), but I found students to be highly receptive to it, and so I kept doing it.

Why might it appeal? One reason, perhaps, is that it takes away a fear of the unknown. Students can relax more in the knowledge of what to expect; that they’re not going to suddenly have a test thrust upon them, for instance.

By helping students structure their writing

Most of my students are rarely short for ideas. What they do find hard though is putting these ideas into words. I spent a lot of time in 2021 explicitly looking at how to structure sentences, paragraphs, and whole pieces of writing (essays, exam responses, descriptions, stories etc.).

An invaluable resource I strongly recommend for any English teacher is ‘Dr Andy’ who I discovered doing just this via his blog and Twitter account: codexterous – Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature (home.blog).

As the good doctor explains, this practice of structuring writing should at first be extensively modelled under a visualiser to scaffold, and then removed gradually as and when appropriate.

I have found that when my students became aware of how to structure their writing their thoughts were freed up to concentrate more on the content of their responses as opposed to the wording of their work; a waterslide that drops them into a task they might have otherwise found hard to access.

Have my own exercise book and write in lessons

A real pleasure I wish I had come across sooner is the joy of writing in lessons myself.

It’s been great at helping me explain what I want students to do. The idea is that their exercise book should mirror mine, so I might do an example first which they copy down, while I explain my thoughts aloud. Then we’ll do an example together, to check they understand what to do and to weed out any misunderstandings. Afterwards, they have a go themselves around which time I’ll proclaim that I too will be doing the same.

I’ve even gone one step further and handed myself an exercise book at the start of the year (‘There you are, Sir’ – ‘Why thank you, Sir’). On the front I’ll even write my name (I haven’t quite got around to writing a date and title yet, but now that I type this I don’t see why I shouldn’t – perhaps that’s what’s needed to address the messy underlining that I sometimes see in student’s exercise books?)

I’ve taught badly-behaved classes before where even the notion of taking my eyes off them for a second would be unthinkable, but this year it seemed to work rather well for most. I might be wrong, but I think some students appreciated that I was bothering to do the task I had set them. As a novice teacher I often felt a bit awkward whenever I set an extended task. I’d get the class in silence, start a timer, and then hover, peering over student’s shoulders or egging the reluctant to get started.

But I felt this made circumstances worse. I might be imagining this, but me floating around the room was giving them an opportunity – to ask me a question, or to glance up to see whether I was watching them. What was going wrong? Was I inviting disruption?

Doing the work myself, however, is showing that I am personally capable of doing what I’m asking of them; that it is not only possible, but dare I say even interesting.

Second, it shows I trust the students to do it in the first place; I expect them to get on with it and not have to be cajoled. By modelling I’m explicitly showing exactly what it is I want my students to do, and how to succeed at it – sitting still; looking at the paper in front of them, not at other students; writing, not talking.

And, so far at least, they seem to be getting on with it.

Let go of grudges

I wish I didn’t do this, but I have the memory of a particularly vengeful elephant and any sort of perceived slight, from students or staff, threatens to stay with me to my grave.

I saw a great tweet recently from @Jeffreykboakye who said: ‘a school is no place for grudges […] you know when you meet that student in the corridor that you’ve had a few historic run-ins with? The most powerful thing to do is to enthusiastically greet them like an old friend.’

Last term I decided to throw caution to the wind and give this a go.

And do you know what? It bloody worked. My cheery ‘Morning!’ elicited positive or, at the very least, neutral responses. Nothing bad happened.

But, most importantly, it just felt good, and you can’t put a price on that.

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So, if you happen to peer into my classroom in 2022 you should see me doing one of two things: hoovering up more knowledge or explaining it to students.

And if you find me doing neither, please take me to task – I promise I won’t hold it against you.