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Shakespeare

The trouble with Shakespeare, or Should everything be made simple?

2021-01-16T13:20:50+00:00October 26th, 2019|English|

I'm regularly inundated by unsolicited emails from folk hoping I'll endorse their products. Recently, I received one asking me if I'd be interested in writing about a collaboration between the software firm Adobe and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Apparently this is the result: Adobe and the RSC have worked with five UK artists and photographers to reimagine iconic Shakespeare scenes to provide inspiration for young people and their teachers. Using illustration, comic book artistry and photography, the artists have recreated pivotal scenes from Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. I don't have any particular interest in this and [...]

The problem with dead white men – a reply to Mary Bousted

2018-06-09T01:08:56+01:00June 9th, 2018|Featured|

Apparently, Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union has announced that England is “hurtling forward to a rosy past” with its emphasis on knowledge. She is reported as having said the following: As an English teacher, I have no problem with Shakespeare, with Pope, with Dryden, with Shelley. ... But I knew in a school where there are 38 first languages taught other than English that I had to have Afro-Caribbean writers in that curriculum, I had to have Indian writers, I had to have Chinese writers to enable pupils to foreshadow their lives in the curriculum.” If a [...]

Castle Shakespeare: Why study the Bard?

2019-11-30T15:34:56+00:00July 23rd, 2017|English, Featured|

Let me give you, let me share with you, the City of Invention. For what novelists do... is to build the Houses of the Imagination, and where houses cluster together there is a city... Let us look round the city: become acquainted with it, make it our eternal, our immortal home. Looming over everything, of course, the heart of the City, is the great Castle Shakespeare. You see it whichever way you look. It rears its head into the clouds, reaching into the celestial sky, dominating everything around. It’s a rather uneven building, frankly. Some complain it’s shoddy, and carelessly constructed [...]

How knowledge is being detached from skills in English

2013-07-22T06:52:56+01:00June 18th, 2013|English|

I don't normally do this. In fact, I haven't put up a post by anyone else since last August. But in this case Joe Kirby has expressed my own thoughts so articulately that there seemed little point trying to repeat the same thing myself. Not only that, Joe is somewhat of a phenomenon. His grasp of the nuances of education theory belies the fact that he is only just completing his NQT year. When I compare his expertise to my ignorance at the same stage of my career I am staggered, and not a little ashamed. As such I would very much like for you to read his [...]

What to know: the importance of cultural capital

2012-04-04T22:02:48+01:00April 4th, 2012|reading|

Let's face it, we need to know to stuff if we're going to have anything resembling a successful life. But what is it we need to know? As an English teacher I have a fair bit of fairly arcane knowledge that few others outside my profession and subject specialism would see as useful. Doctors know all kinds of stuff, and they save lives. Surely everything they know is vitally important? Well, if it is I've muddled along without knowing the vast majority of it. The same goes for anyone from green grocers to figure skaters to lion tamers: the knowledge we [...]

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