Why Students Feel They Don’t Belong in the English Classroom
I want to tell you why English has changed for the worst, despite our good intentions. And then I’m going suggest ways to fix it.
This has been prompted by a trip to America. I used to love America. I felt I belonged. But now, like the English students in our classrooms, not so much.
To illustrate this, come with me to Hollywood. Within 10 minutes you’ll meet more homeless people than walking a day in London’s streets.
In one day you’ll meet more mentally ill people than you’ll meet in a decade in your home town.
You’ll meet more shout-out-load-crazy people in a week than an entire lifetime in the UK. These people don’t belong. They’re sprawled on the streets, shouting in the subway, desperate to be noticed or heard.
Regular people will resist using headphones like they resisted wearing COVID masks. They are desperate to create a space that’s theirs. And so they bring speakers and dominate their space with sound.
Go anywhere in LA, and you’ll find directions incomplete. Walking anywhere is a lottery. Art galleries are hidden away, unsignposted. You ask directions from employees about a venue you know is only 200 meters away and they are clueless. They just work here, but they don’t belong in this part of the city.
And the service is now awful. The smiles are vanishing. There are excuses, broken coffee machines, no cups … not my problem. I just work here.
This is so different to the America I’ve been visiting for the last 18 years. People went out of their way to help you. They were so glad you were visiting. They went the extra mile.
So, how is this like English in our schools? It’s like this.
English was once the most inclusive and popular A level. Every year, until 2012, it was the number one choice. By 2022, it was the 12th most popular. The missing students now choose sociology and psychology. They aren’t fleeing because they want a STEM subject, employability or higher pay. They’re leaving in droves because for most English is either pointless, boring or both.
We’ve done that.
We’ve been herded that way by the artificiality and sheer lack of intellectual thought in the creation of the GCSE. Yes, I’m looking at you AQA. We’ve stopped our students understanding, participating in or belonging to the world of English.
And the cowboys and cowgirls whipping the herd along are the myriad of teachers who started teaching in the last 10 years, spreading good intentioned rubbish on Twitter and inefficient teaching methods in books.
You might think this is unreasonable, unfounded and harsh. Well, let’s look at the subject day to day in a secondary school near you.
What does it now mean to study English?
Some of the things we make students do:
Quote exploders.
PEE, PEEL, PETAL paragraphs. Or some other mnemonic deifying the paragraph.
What, Where, How, Why paragraphs, where students learn to write 300 words about a single quotation.
Vocabulary learning through definitions.
KS3 assessments, starting with the extract.
Annotating. Oh, the annotating. Copying from the board, or the visualiser.
Extracts, rather than whole texts. Annotated.
Methods for exam questions - a different one for each of the 10 language questions (often even at KS3).
Poetry studied for the purpose of writing comparisons. And annotation.
Read dystopian and gothic texts by depressed or depressing writers.
Descriptive writing that you won’t find in 99.9% of novels - real writers don’t do it.
The naming of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs for no purpose.
Fronted adverbials. Epithets. Appositives.
Rehearsed sentence types. Writing by numbers.
What students are no longer taught to be good at.
Our curriculum choices are often inspired. What students read, and the sequence in which they read it is given loving care and attention. But the curriculum is mainly what students do, not just what they read.
How much of what they do is in the list above?
Below is a list of what they ought to do, if we wanted them to be great at English. If we wanted the subject to matter to them. If we wanted them to belong.
How to craft a real story, like those published by real writers.
How to redraft, from start to finish, and therefore to get dramatically better over time.
How to write poems.
How to read poems out loud, or memorise and perform them. Ditto plays.
How to write a coherent essay, which begins with a thesis statement and follows an argument through a text, to an outward looking conclusion.
How to write creatively for a real audience in a real range of forms.
How to write any text longer than 500 words (unless they are privileged by setting or being in year 11).
How to write any text longer than 1000 words.
How to imitate real writers.
How to write a story for pleasure, both of the writer and reader.
How to create an anthology of personal writing.
How to touch type or dictate.
How to précis.
How to argue opposing points of view about a text, character, theme or author.
How to argue and structure a formal debate.
How to write speeches about issues that they believe in.
How to write biography and autobiography.
How to write a reading journal.
Satire.
I can sum it up in one sentence:
We no longer teach students to be students of English.
They don’t master the subject, nor do they explore it. Is it any surprise they don’t enjoy it?
And this is because they don’t belong. English no longer makes them a better person. They are not part of a community of writers or readers. They don’t develop a voice that deserves to be heard.
They are like my Americans, desperate to be heard, but having nothing to say. They are like the employees plonked in a city, unaware of what it has to offer because they experience it only piecemeal, as a function of their job or commute. The signposts are hidden.
Books they read are not shaped by their society, they are not in conversation with the texts that preceded them. Instead, texts are grouped by theme, like home decor, or by the hero’s journey (which is like every book ever written).
Our students are homeless in the English classroom, because they have no foundations for a house. We just give them a random supply of bricks, we build an occasional wall and occasionally manage part of a roof. Sample this, compare that, annotate it and write me some more description.
Let me show you how to write a paragraph, children!
Still Not Convinced?
Imagine a totally, monster-raving-loony Education Secretary is appointed. They say, “we’re scrapping English GCSEs. From now on you can only assess students on being brilliant at writing and reading.
Whatever students produce, English teachers across the UK, or in America, or in Australia, or New Zealand, or Canada would need to be able to read it and agree - yes, that’s bloody good writing. Yes, that kid really knows how to ‘read’ literature.”
What tasks would you set? Write them down, and stop when you have 10.
How many of them look anything like the tasks students are set in your English curriculum?
P.S. I took a 3 week trip to New Zealand to see my daughter - that was great. And on the return trip, I’m 5 days in to a week in San Francisco. America is better here. But the lost are still very much in evidence.