When I was an English teacher - and that was nearly all my working life - I was more creative than most. I sought to engage children in different ways, get them interested in our language and feel genuine accomplishment no matter what level their literacy had reached.
As years passed and the demands of formal examinations became more constraining, it became quite difficult to keep the candle of creativity burning, illuminating young minds. For instance, the so-called National Curriculum had us teaching proscribed Shakespeare texts to struggling youngsters so that they could have a stab at Key Stage Three exams that were essentially designed for middle class kids from leafy suburbs.
I could feel my least able pupils' pain and past experience had taught me that this was not the way to bolster standards of literacy. In fact, it was often the way to make less able children feel more useless than they already felt. Historical trust in classroom teachers to do what was best had been shredded in favour of centralised edicts and vague skeleton planning in glossy A4 folders that often left chalkface English teachers feeling lost, constantly wondering if they were doing what was expected of them or not.
But if I might return to the years of creativity... I used a variety of methods to get early secondary school children writing their own poems. I noticed that modern poetry anthologies frequently included accompanying pictures. Of course the editors of those collections picked the poems first and the visual images followed so I turned this process on its head and asked pupils to create poems inspired by pictures. Sometimes, with this end in mind, I even took them to local art galleries to make preparatory notes.
Having neglected to post one of my own poems on this blog for a good while now, I thought it would be an interesting exercise if I set myself the picture before the poem task.
This is the picture.
I took it in the Yorkshire town of Selby in the summer of 2020 during a lull in the COVID restrictions.
And this is the poem ...Created in half an hour this September night, three years after that far stranger one.
2020
We rang our bells like lepers
"Unclean! Unclean!"
Drifting along half empty streets
Faces hidden by surgical masks
Furtively glancing at those who passed
Going nowhere.
Going home.
We switched on television sets
"Stay Home! Save Lives!"
Wondering if we might die soon
Fears hidden by masks of ribaldry or
Desperately joining quizzes on "Zoom".
Saving Lives,
Staying Home.
We booked our vaccinations
"Hands! Face! Space!"
Believing we might at last be saved -
Rescued by boffins in white lab coats
Cleverly developing antidotes
Shaking test tubes,
Shaking hands.
