Galway Man: Stage 5 English

Hello and how are you? It feels like only yesterday that the 2019 school year was just starting and now here we are in Term 4. Before you know it, the last assessment tasks will be done and dusted, reports will be written, and students will start thinking about building forts in the woods and riding their BMXs down to the river (kids still spent their summer holidays doing that, right?)

In the last few weeks of Term 4 I usually find myself needing a few stand-alone lessons. It's important that these lessons don't feel like 'throw-away' content... when students cotton on that you don't attach value to what they're doing then they'll tend not to value it either. The antidote to this can be to work on the skills needed for ongoing success in English.

This lesson below is a Stage 5 activity that I usually use for Year 9 as part of a genre unit focused on creative writing. It can also double, however, as something that can be used to help students develop specialised literacy skills at any point in Stage 5 - for example, the ability to identify genre through recognition of common motifs and generic conventions used, the ability to monitor a text for adjectives and adjectival groups, and utilising comprehension skills to predict the direction a text will go in.

Context

Teaching Stage 5 English in a mixed ability classroom often means working with a broad range of students. Differentiated curriculum can take many forms when we teach and, perhaps most often, it tends to come into the classroom in a flexible rapid-response form via the teacher adapting to the fluctuating levels of ability exhibited by individual students. 

One of my favourite forms of differentiation is the the lesson planning process adapted from the Gagne model and used by GERRIC. This involves creating material that targets three separate tiers of ability within the classroom - mainstream material for the core of the class, adapted material for those who may be struggling to meet outcomes, and extension material for those who may be considered gifted. It's important to acknowledge here that 'extension' doesn't mean extra work, it should instead take the place of work undertaken by the main core of the class.

Another thing to acknowledge is that it's near impossible to differentiate every single lesson of work in this way as it essentially means doing three times the work. Instead, it's worth aiming to just do this every now and again so that you can assess what level your students are working at and evaluate how they cope with material that more specifically targets their ability level.

The Lesson: Galway Man

The crux of this lesson is a short horror story called Galway Man. This piece has been designed as something that should be suitable for a Year 9 class exhibiting a range of different abilities and behaviours.

What this means is - it's relatively short to allow for engagement of students who struggle with attention in the classroom, and it's written in a way to allow accessibility for students who may have reading levels as low as those typically encountered in Stage 3. It's important to push student reading levels by exposing them to material that will challenge them but this is something that should be done purposefully and not all the time. If we're looking to build things like vocabulary, sustained understanding via extensive comprehension of cohesion, or an ability to parse sophisticated sentence structures then, of course, we should be challenging students with texts beyond their usual reading scope. However, if we want to work on introducing students to other skills like understanding symbolism and imagery, or the ability to explain genre, then we need simply-constructed texts that can allow for these things to be the focus.

Resource: Galway Man - short story.

The Lesson: Pre-Reading

Before reading the text it might be worth doing a quick check of student understanding regarding the phenomenon of bog bodies as this is the main idea behind the 'horror' of the text. These bodies are human remains that have been accidentally preserved for thousands of years after being submerged in swampy peat-heavy marshland. Bog bodies tend to occur in Western Europe and date from the Bronze Age.

Resource: Pre-Reading - PowerPoint Presentation.

The Lesson: Post-Reading

Students can undertake one of the activity sheets after reading the short story. There are two ways to approach determining who does which sheet:

1. Hand out the three different levels of sheets according to which students you think fit into the 'core', 'adjusted', and 'extension' groupings of ability. If any students question why they can't have a different sheet then, by all means, let them have a go at the sheet they prefer. If they find it too easy then you've both learned something, if they find it too hard then at least they challenged themselves.
2. Let students pick the sheet they want to do - I usually place the sheets on a table underneath the whiteboard with arrows pointing down to the three piles labelling them as 'Regular', 'Hard', and 'Hardest'. It can very educational for the teacher to see which students pick which one. 

The sheets roughly correspond to the same pattern of learning broken into 4-5 sections.

• Prediction: After students have been taken through the pre-reading PPT, ask them to think about what a short story called Galway Man might be about. Students then compare their prediction to how the story turned out.
• Adjectives: Monitor the text to locate and isolate adjectives/adjectival groups.
• Character or Flashback: Students actively consider the process of characterisation. This looks different on each sheet - ranging from a visualisation activity to an opportunity for students to draw explicit connections between a character and his purpose in the text. Some sheets may add or replace this with an examination of the story's use of a flashback as a structural narrative device.
• Genre: Students identify the ways in which the story fits into a specific genre, developing increased awareness of the significance of code and convention.

Resource: Adjusted Activity sheet
Resource: Core Activity sheet
Resource: Extension Activity sheet

Craft of Writing: Stream-of-Consciousness, Reported Speech, and Anadiplosis

Here is one more installment of some Craft of Writing mini-lessons before the HSC examinations are upon us. These are mini-lessons designed to support students in practising writing craft all year-round. Below are three writing techniques or elements that can be brought into close-up to make the craft of writing more explicit for students. 

Stream of Consciousness 

What is it: In psychology this refers to a person's thoughts and reactions and the way they can be perceived as a continuous flow. In literature it refers to an author's attempt to represent this by an uninterrupted stretch of the character thinking, uninterrupted by dialogue or a traditional narrative.

Example:

• "Should he cast by type or against type? Uglies in parts that call for beauty, a gorgeous hunk for Caliban? Put them into roles that will force them to explore their hidden depths, or are those depths better left unexplored? Challenge the audience by showing them well-known characters in surprising and possibly disagreeable guises?" - Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood.

Why use it:

• Developed by a group of early 20th century authors to put the reader inside a character's head and demonstrate greater depth of characterisation.
• Can convey to the reader a greater sense of a character's motivation in regards to the narrative.
• Authors can use it to explore a character's past through glimpses of flashbacks.
  

Quick Activity: Pick a supporting character from Hag-Seed or The Tempestand write a paragraph (using stream of consciousness) that explores their feelings mid-way through the narrative. 

Reported Speech

 

What is it: There are two kinds of speaking in literature. Direct speech refers to speech that takes place in quotation marks, such as "Hey, what's up?" The other kind, reported speech, refers to a character paraphrasing or reporting what a character has generally said.

Examples:

• "She's insisting on greenery, she's making him eat kale" - Felix indirectly conveys Miranda's dialogue in Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
• "When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease." - From the short story 'The Story of an Hour' by Kate Chopin.
  

Why use it:

• Allows for the narrator to retain 'control' of the story; what the audience 'hears' is only what the narrator tells them. This can also reinforce an author's attempt to create an unreliable narrator.
• The author can use reported speech to blend dialogue and action together more seamlessly.
• Creates a greater distance between the reader and the events of the text, and can help to condense time into smaller amounts of text.
  

Quick Activity: Pick a segment of The Tempest or Hag-Seed that uses direct dialogue and rewrite it as a short paragraph that shows both direct speech and reported speech.  

Anadiplosis

What is it: A rhetorical form of repetition in which the last word or clause of a paragraph/sentence is repeated near the beginning of the next section of text. The word 'anadiplosis' comes from the Greek word for 'doubling / folding up'.

Examples:

• "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hates leads to suffering" - Yoda in The Phantom Menace, directed by George Lucas.
• "It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing" - 'Redfern' speech by Paul Keating (1992)
• "Don't blame me, blame me fucking hormones" - Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
  

Why use it:

• To emphasise the significance of a particular word or idea.
• The changing placement of the key word or clause in question helps to shift the way a reader thinks of it. 
• Can show a chain of events / cause and effect when used multiple times in close proximity.
• Allows writers to sometimes indicate multiple meanings associated with one word.
• Can make a suggestion or an order more effective when delivered with authority.

Quick Activity: Write a short persuasive speech that includes an example of anadiplosis. This speech should be about why the voting age should or shouldn't be lowered to 16. 

You can find all these together on one handy sheet below:

• Writology Issue 8

Happy writing!

Texts and Human Experiences: The Merchant of Venice

Not too long ago I had the opportunity to present some material relating to The Merchant of Venice within the context of the HSC Texts and Human Experiences Common Module. These resources are a small part of the textbook The Merchant of Venice, which I wrote for Into English at the beginning of this year.

With kind permission from the publisher, I have uploaded these presentation materials here for anyone potentially considering The Merchant of Venice as their Common Module text when teaching Year 12 English next term. This was initially presented in 2019 at the ETA NSW Conference. The version below is an updated/adjusted version that was presented to Aurora College for their HSC Seminar Day in 2022.

• Texts and Human Experiences: The Merchant of Venice - PowerPoint Presentation
• The Merchant of Venice - Resources
  

The textbook can be purchased digitally or in material form from the following places:

• Into English 
• Australian Curriculum Supplies 

The play itself is, as expected, an incredibly rich and layered text and is actually perfectly crafted as expression of human experiences.

Advanced English: Infographics

My Year 12 Advanced English class is currently quite deep into 'revision mode'. Naturally, the students want to prepare as best they can for the upcoming HSC exams and, naturally, I want them to do this by writing as many practice responses to essay questions as possible. We're currently meeting about halfway on this and, in the spirit of preparation, I hoped to provide a useful overview that summarised some of the key concerns of the modules and the prescribed texts. 

Below you will find some graphic organisers for Common Module - Texts and Human Experiences: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Module A - Textual Conversations: The Tempest & Hag-Seed. As they're hand-drawn they aren't as flash as I'd like them to be but I think (as far as first drafts go) that they'll do the job. Apologies for the font on the Module A one - I was experimenting and I guess I won't be using that particular font again!

Download full size Nineteen Eighty-Four
Download full size The Tempest & Hag-Seed

I'm thinking I'll get the students to have a go at looking at their Craft of Writing texts in this fashion as part of their revision too.

Craft of Writing: Ellipsis, Anthimeria, and Antithesis

 

Time for another installment of some Craft of Writing mini-lessons. As mentioned in more detail previously on this blog, these are mini-lessons designed to support students in practising writing craft all year-round. Below are three writing techniques or elements that can be brought into close-up to make the craft of writing more explicit for students.

Ellipsis

What is it: Anything that has been 'cut out' or omitted from a text. This is often explicitly denoted by three dots '...' but can also be implicitly used without the punctuation marks, such as when a key detail is deliberately left unsaid or taken out of the text.

Examples:

• "Did he... peacefully?" - The Dubliners, James Joyce
• "Honestly, Vernon Gregory, if your father was here..." - Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre

Why use it: 

• Omits unnecessary words in everyday language, EG. "I asked for a Pepsi, [I did] not [ask for] Coke."
• Indicates in dialogue when someone loses a train of thought, or gets cut off, or deliberately leaves something unsaid. Can build tension in this way, or reinforce characterisation.
• Used by academics and journalists when quoting, with [...] to signify when a quote has been trimmed down for usefulness.
• Conveys 'jumps' in thinking during stream-of-consciousness.
• In a broader sense, ellipsis is used to remove parts of a narrative that are either unnecessary (the Harry Potter series takes place over 7 years but Rowling only includes the parts of Harry's life that are relevant to the main narrative) or intended to be ambiguous (certain details related to Laura Wishart's life and death are left unsaid in the novel Jasper Jones).

Quick Activity: Write an exchange, using ellipsis, between a character from The Tempestand a character from Hag-Seed.

Anthimeria

What is it: Taking a word and using it in a way contrary to its normal grammar function. This could be using a noun as a verb, or a verb or noun as an adjective. Anthimeria can often start as a form of slang before becoming a permanent part of the language. It demonstrates the way the English language is constantly changing.

Examples:

• "Way to red plague go!" - Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood
• "Teach me how to dougie" - the song 'Teach Me How to Dougie' by Cali Swag District; about a dance named after the '80s rapper Doug E. Fresh.

Why use it: 

• Cultural changes can lead to words being used in new ways, such as a proper noun (Orwell) being used as an adjective (Orwellian).
• Can be used to build a distinct shared lexicon between a set of characters when they talk to each other.
• A lot of neologisms (new words) are often examples of anthimeria - 'texting', 'hashtagging', etc. 
• Used in pop culture to grab attention or emphasise new ideas. 

Quick Activity: Invent two anthimeria and then use them in a sentence each. One must be a noun turned into a verb, the other a noun turned into an adjective.

Antithesis

What is it: An opposition between two things. This can include opposition between two statements or ideas. These pairs are presented in a similar fashion, or in close proximity, and to qualify as antithesis there must be parallel use of grammatical structure or equal weight given to each of the ideas.

Examples:

• "She is ten times more gentle than her father (is ten times) crabbed" - The Tempest, William Shakespeare
• "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - Neil Armstrong, moon-landing (1969)
• "We will extend a hand if you are unwilling to unclench your fist" - Inaugural speech from Barack Obama (2009)
• On a conceptual scale, Ariel and Caliban are presented as the antithesis of one another in The Tempest - both are servants to Prospero but one is linked to the air, the other the earth.

Why use it:

• To show contrast in order to emphasise one side of the contrast.
• Separating an idea into two halves in this manner can demonstrate its duality and/or complexity.
• Separating an idea into two opposing halves can indicate a sense of tension between the halves.
• Builds a sense of difference between ideas when presented on a larger scale. 

Quick Activity: Write a 4-8 line piece of poetry about the view from a window. Make sure that it demonstrates antithesis.  

You can find these all together on a handy sheet below:

• Writology Issue 7

Happy writing!

The Secret River: A Study Guide

The Extension English 1 Elective Literary Homelands offers both teacher and student the chance to parse some quite accessible texts in a sophisticate fashion. The choice of texts for Extension English, perhaps more so than those prescribed for Advanced English, are representative of the fine-toothed wire upon which our culture sits. There's a sharpness, an edginess, a robust and stinging conversation that echoes through some of the texts that have been made available for study in this part of our syllabus.

One such text is Andrew Bovell's dramatic adaptation of Kate Grenville's The Secret River - a play that courted some degree of controversy upon its release and will no doubt provide fertile ground for discussion in the Extension English classes that grapple with its polemical and forthright narrative of colonial confrontation.

What follows is a study guide for the play that seeks to identify key quotes or examples from the text that allow for analysis in relation to Literary Homelands. Each example is paired with both the kernels of analysis (the second column) and an evaluative/critical breakdown of how this links to the elective (the third column). Approximately two out of every three examples are accompanied by some prompts outlined in bold, which students can use to demonstrate their understanding of how the text can be synthesised into an understanding of the elective. 

Study Guide: The Secret River (click to download)

A few key overarching ideas to note that will help students crystalise the play's placement within the elective:

• The impact of our postcolonial perspective on the way the colonial narrative of settler-era Australia has been represented in The Secret River. Think also of the colonial structures that exist in the way the Thornhills do things, express themselves, and project expectations onto the Dharug.
• The parallels, commonalities, and disparities between the Thornhill/Hawkesbury community and the Dharug people. This can be framed from the standpoint of cross-cultural transition and cultural exchange. 
• The way that notions of homeland shift and change from character to character, particularly Sal and Will Thornhill, over the course of the play. 
• The freed convicts as migrants. Keep in mind, however, that the migrants in this case exist within multiple hierarchies. When compared with the Dharug, the migrants are constructing a dominant power structure rather than settling into a marginalised space. In contrast with this though, the convicts have come from their own marginalised space as an underclass in British society. 
• Consider the above in relation to which voices are privileged marginalised or silence.
•  The role that beliefs play in the shaping of identity and claims to 'homeland'.
• The role of language and dialect as representational elements utilised by the author.
• The nature of transgression in relation to values expressed and reinforced by each cultural group within the text.

Happy reading!

Romeo and Juliet: A New Translation

 

About a year ago I put up a new 'translation' of Shakespeare's Macbeth that could be used in a mixed ability Stage 5 classroom. The provision of this as a single PDF allowed for the printing of booklets that could be read by the students without scanning back and forth to compare the modern English with Shakespeare's English (as is the case with the No Fear Shakespeare editions). Below you will find a similarly translated version of Romeo & Juliet that can also be used in a mixed ability Stage 5 classroom.

My reasons for doing this are as follows:

• I've gotten a lot of use out of the No Fear editions over the years but I wanted something that Western Sydney kids could engage in an easier way. Some of the language in the No Fear editions can feel 'clunky', or overly slavish to the original text - sometimes to the point of losing the essence of what Shakespeare was actually trying to say. For example, references to ancient Greek or Roman deities just don't make the same impact on teenagers these days. Why not replace such a reference with something else that gets the same point across?
• I've found that junior students can sometimes get confused by the reading pathway of the No Fear editions as they present the two versions of the text side-by-side. This is great for examining specific extracts but I think it can slow down the process of just enjoying Shakespeare's characters and plotting, especially if these are students who are already resistant to reading a 400 year old play.
• By working through the text and translating it myself I found I got a much clearer idea of what was happening in the play. This kind of close reading was incredibly valuable to me as a teacher. 

Undertaking this process also helped me form new opinions on things I hadn't really considered. I mean, it probably doesn't help that I'd never read the entire play from start to finish as an adult, but anyway... here are some of my favourite realisations!

• Romeo isn't in love. He just wants to have sex. By modern standards, the relationship he has with Juliet is actually kind of toxic. It's hard to read it so closely and not get the impression that Shakespeare is knowingly exloring the emotional detriment of a codependent relationship.
• Nurse is an incredibly irritating and self-contradicting character, and possibly one of my favourite Shakespearean comedy creations.
• It's actually a really rude text - plenty of people have written about this, but I never quite realised how rude it was until I got to the bit about medlar fruits and open arses.
• I take back what I said about Nurse, I think Peter might be my favourite comedic character in this play. The bit where he tries to talk to the musicians who have arrived for Juliet's wedding is still funny after all these centuries.
• Friar Lawrence is the most important character in the whole text. He encapsulates the play's theme of duality and reflects the Elizabethan concept of the Great Chain of Being through his discussion of the spectrum that exists between sin and virtue.
• The random introduction of the character 'Petruchio' into the Tybalt-Mercutio-Romeo fight scene led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about ghost characters. These are essentially characters that writers put in early drafts of texts and then later, while removing said character, accidentally remain in one or two references. Another ghost character, Valentine, is also mentioned earlier in the play - intended as Mercutio's brother but mostly removed when Shakespeare wrote later drafts.

Anyway, enough waffle, here is the play:

• Romeo & Juliet translated

(Disclaimer: apologies for any typos in the PDF above - I didn't get a chance to do a second draft as I was keen to give the text a try with my Year 9 students this upcoming term)