Wake by Tim Winton (Reading to Write)

Hi. 

Like many of us, I'm finding the COVID-19 pandemic an incredibly anxious and trying time. I haven't posted much on the blog lately because it's felt like a low priority, especially as society seems to shrink up into a ball of hibernation around us. School doesn't feel like school at the moment, it's surreal and disassociative, and there's so much to unpack in what's happening but it just makes me feel mentally exhausted.

Anyway. 

Earlier this term my Year 11 Advanced English class read Tim Winton's short story 'Wake'. It's about 9 pages long and can be found in Scission, a collection of short stories first published in 1985. We approached the Reading to Write Common Module by looking at various short pieces as I wanted to broaden the scope of things that students may have read up until this point. This is what we looked at this term before everything unravelled:

• 'Introduction to Poetry' by Billy Collins (Poem)
• 'Brooklyn Snow' by Omar Musa (Poem)
• 'Sticks' by George Saunders (Flash Fiction)
• 'Wake' by Tim Winton (Short Story)
• 'B is For Bullshit', extract from The Lucy Family Alphabet by Judith Lucy (Discursive Writing)
• 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place' by Ernest Hemingway (Modernist Short Story)
• 'Our Trip' by Lydia Davis (Postmodern Short Story)
• '2 B R 0 2 B' by Kurt Vonnegut (Science Fiction Short Story)
• 'SJ' by Ellen Van Neerven (Short Story)

After reading 'Wake' we drilled down into some of the techniques and writing mechanics of Winton's piece. It's not anything revolutionary but I think the students found it useful to look at the story up-close in this way, and it would work well if you're currently teaching via Google Classroom or through some other online platform. The PowerPoint attached below covers motifs, use of semicolons, dialogue rules, and pathetic fallacy. Each slide comes with in-built discussion and questions that can be covered after the story has been read.

'Wake' - PPT (Click to Download)
And the story itself - 'Wake' by Tim Winton.

Hope it helps and best wishes to you all :)

As Thick as a Brick

I was talking with my Year 10 English class today about motifs. We're studying the wonderful Australian novel Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey, and there are number of motifs woven into the narrative. The most notable of these is probably recurring language that revolves around water metaphors, reminding the reader of a certain traumatic event that occurs in Chapter 1 and the way this event is always at the forefront of the narrator's mind.

But I digress.

There's also a lot of talk in the text about a 'brick' that sits in the protagonist's stomach. As I discussed it with my class it incidentally set me to thinking about bricks... actual bricks, not metaphorical ones. I've got a brick story.

When I was 11 years old I was placed into a class alongside students in the next grade up. There were about five of us from Year 5 put in with the Year 6s, and at the time I had no idea why I was there or why they'd even mixed the grades.

My teacher was named Mr Woodcock and, even at the age of 11, I could sense that he didn't really like me. The only other thing I remember about him is that he had a black beard and rheumy eyes. That, and this one time when I brought a brick to school.

It's hard to imagine your childhood self through the eyes of the adults of that time, but I could imagine that I must have been irritating to some of them. I collected stamps, and coins, and a series of illustrated bird cards released by a brand of tea called Kinkara. Once, when another teacher, Mr. Allison, told the class that he was 29 years old, I expressed amazement that he had so little hair. The look he gave in reply made me feel about 2 centimetres tall. I guess some would call this precociousness. It's a trait that I'm much more familiar with now that I'm on the other side of the equation, dealing with chirpy Year 7 students who will happily tell me that my own hair is significantly diminished. Ironic, right?

Anyway, back in Year 5, Mr. Woodcock gave an assignment to make a brick. The brick could be made using any number of methods, and it had to weigh as close to a kilogram as possible. I went home and told Mum, and she let me empty out a tub of Flora margarine. I filled it with mud and sticks, and I let it set in the sun before popping it in the freezer for extra hardness. When I was happy and satisfied enough with the result I stuffed it into my school bag and took it in to class.

No one else had their bricks.

I was a little confused. I triumphantly showed my lumpy margarine-shaped brick to the other kids in the playground before school, but they didn't have theirs. They didn't even know about the assignment, and laughed at me when I tried to explain it. Obviously there had been no such assignment. Mr. Woodcock had just told me to do it because I must have been annoying him too much, and he wanted to see if I would actually go home and make a brick. There was no mark, no feedback for my method of brick-construction. I was just left with this odd weight in my bag.

Suffice to say, I tested the strength of my product later that day during lunch time. I proceeded to drop it from a variety of heights until it broke apart into a series of chalky orange fragments held together by a web of thick grass and gum tree twigs.

And that's my brick story.