How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Knowledge is everything – history
How to teach novels

Sadly, over the years, there’s been a huge decrease in the number of schools teaching novels in full. The demands and pressures of exams has meant that the experience has been narrowed and compartmentalised and novels reduced to key extracts. My feeling is that students should experience as many novels as possible, and it is the role of the English department to ensure they do just that.

The key word in the above paragraph is ’experience’, because that is what a novel is. The danger can be in placing too much emphasis on making it about enjoyment and fun. By reading a novel, students experience the situations the characters live through. A different world. A different time. If we teach them that reading is solely about enjoyment, we neglect an integral part of the experience. By reading a novel, you get a feel for and learn from a person who is not you, who is different. Make it about enjoyment and you reduce a complex experience to a star rating. What would you give that chapter out of five?

I have watched the approach to novels change and, probably more importantly, the books selected have also undergone a profound shift. As a child in the eighties, I read and was taught about social issues: books explored in the classroom tended to have an agenda. In the nineties and noughties, they tended to focus on plot rather than issues. They’d be sparsely written, but they’d have a good story. I tend to prefer complex books and something with a bit of bite, something political, something meaty and adult to work with, something with bigger ideas, something that doesn’t talk down to children. My favourite ones to teach are:

Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Oliver Twist

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

I like teaching them for several reasons, but mainly because they teach the lesson themselves. Pick up any of these books and you can always find something interesting and meaningful to say about the way in which they’re written. Take a lot of modern class readers and you really have to struggle. These books are classics for a reason.

Another reason why the selection of titles is important is, again, about experience. Students would not necessarily gravitate towards these books unless they have particularly pushy parents or a desire to read everything, so these books open their eyes to a new realm. I am always surprised when teachers are all for reading Shakespeare yet bemoan the use of classics as they don’t speak or appeal to students. I go back to the point I made at the start of this book: it is the teacher’s job to make texts relevant. If you select a book on the basis of interest, then you are being lazy. Taking the route of least resistance is easy. I could certainly teach lessons on films, TV shows and computer games. Would that make them better writers? No. A teacher made Jane Eyre relevant to me. And that teacher became more relevant by their use of the book. I connected with the book and, as the teacher was part of that process, with them.

We like to think we know best: the ’I was a teenager once and so therefore know what teenagers like’ idea. Human beings are complex and have complex interests. You can never predict what a student will like or engage with emotionally or intellectually. I’d say that we are in danger of insulting students and reinforcing negative stereotypes if we pick texts to suit them rather than simply going for effective, interesting and intellectually stimulating books. Picking a book because it has blood, death and violence for the boys will create a limited cycle of experience. No one style of film, literature or music pleases everybody. We each have such a variety of interests that if you tried to pick something to suit everyone you’d have a mighty struggle. So just pick a challenging book and see what interests the students. Often you’ll find it isn’t what you expected.

The other thing to draw on is the magic of reading. It has saved me planning lessons. It has saved the behaviour of a class. Read a novel and the class can become hypnotised; quiet, attentive and focused. Why wouldn’t you repeat that again and again? Why would you not have whole lessons dedicated to reading?

There has never been a better time to be a book lover. Books are brilliantly presented nowadays and there are entire publishing imprints geared towards young people, but we have to build a love for and a culture of reading. There is a problem with students’ concentration, and books are the remedy. The level of concentration needed to read a book is intense, yet we are reading shorter and shorter extracts because we fear that reading isn’t learning. I would dare to say that English departments are pioneers in building concentration. I will spend acres of time reading with a class because I am building up their concentration and their ability to focus. Will they not need this in the exam?

1. Knowledge is everything — history

There’s an interesting debate around reading in class. Do you reveal the plot and then read the novel? Or do you let the plot unfold over time? It is a hard decision to make, but it is an important one.

There are several elements to cover when studying a novel: plot, character, language, themes and structure. And they tend to follow this order of complexity. Plot, unless it is a Shakespeare play or a whodunnit, is usually the easiest to grasp. It is hard to talk effectively about structure and themes when a student isn’t secure on the plot and characters. You see this when students constantly ask who the characters are or who, in their writing, insist on retelling the plot. They do this to establish the basics. If you let the plot unfold, then you are constantly starting at zero and working through those comprehension elements. What happened? What has changed with the characters? What is interesting about how it is written?

The popularity of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is, in part, due to its easily distinguished and recognisable characters: the one with curly hair, the one with a stump for a hand and a smelly dog: the one everybody loves and admires. Harper Lee’s superior (in my opinion) To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t as popular as it has a wider community of characters. For years, I hid Lennie and George’s fate in Of Mice and Men because I was trying to hold on to the personal experience the students have when encountering a book for the first time. The sad thing is that reading in the classroom is a collective experience, so you can guarantee that someone in ’the collective’ will announce loudly that George kills Lennie, or will relish whispering it to their neighbour who, in turn, will pass it around like classroom gossip.

We are more interested in the way the book is written than the plot. How many exams ask students to retell the story in their own words? When looking at how a novel is written, you need to know the plot really well. But only in a murder mystery is the ending the most important thing. All other stories are about the journey rather than the destination.

Give students the plot from the start. Tell them loosely what happens. The rise of the knowledge organiser has helped with this element.

Year 9 knowledge organiser: Of Mice and Men

Source: Kat Howard

Then, when they know the plot of the story, they can see the following when reading:

✵ How Steinbeck foreshadows the fate of the characters.

✵ How Steinbeck makes us like the characters, especially Lennie, so we feel attached to them and shocked at the ending.

✵ How Steinbeck sets up the characters as clear goodies and baddies.

✵ How Steinbeck builds up and destroys hope.

Reveal the story one chapter at a time and you are less likely to get to that high level of insight because your time is spent looking at the plot and the characters (focusing on the ’what’ rather than the ’how’). Watch a decent film. You get caught up in the plot, and you fail to see the beautiful and subtle use of lighting and colour. It is usually only on the second or third viewing that you pick up these nuances. Focus on the plot and you might as well be an entertainer. I have listened to teachers enthuse about whole classes crying at the death of Lennie and have been a little jealous that they managed to prevent students from finding out spoilers.

An important part of the reading experience is understanding the historical context. Too often we look through the culturally conditioned eyes of an adult. I have read lots of books, so it is easy to forget that I pick up the subtle things writers do to create a world. Plus, as an adult reader, I have lots of points of reference. I might have watched a film set at the time or read a book that explores the period. Students have more limited frames of reference. I can’t guarantee that every student has watched Oliver!, so when teaching a Victorian novel I have to start by assuming that their slate is more or less blank. Take the following points I provide when reading A Christmas Carol:

A Christmas Carol: 1843, historical context

✵ The Industrial Revolution allowed the rich to exploit the poor and thus become richer.

✵ The industries tended to be located near major cities so people migrated from rural to urban areas seeking jobs.

✵ There was not enough space to accommodate the influx of people so settlements became overcrowded.

✵ Particular areas of overcrowding were referred to as slums.

✵ Increased rates of diseases and illnesses occurred as a result of overcrowding and poor sanitation.

✵ Life expectancy was low and infant mortality high in the lower classes, so it was common for families to be large.

I am not only teaching them the story but the world it inhabits, so they understand the novel better. Stories are about world building. Some are closer to our own world than others, but we have to make that clear. A science fiction story might build a barely recognisable world, but the teacher needs to help deconstruct a world that was written with a contemporary readership, rather than our students, in mind; this can appear just as unfamiliar.

After giving students these statements, I ask them what they think the Victorians’ attitudes or feelings towards death or childhood were. The facts themselves are limited points of understanding. Context isn’t just about facts; it’s about ideas. Facts become meaningful when attached to the texts studied. When reading Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol, students are always shocked by the treatment of infant mortality because current rates are so relatively low as to be, in their eyes, nigh on non-existent and so not a factor to consider. I have had students imply that Pip’s parents were overly randy rather than address the fact that the chances of a child living to adulthood were significantly lower in Victorian times. For us it might be obvious, but for students it is alien.

I list contextual facts and then get students to empathise by asking how they’d feel if this was their reality. We are building relevance. The historical context might be alien, but the issues are often universal. Sometimes, I will add the notion of ’rules’. Based on these facts, what were the rules of life then? Under the contextual facts, there is always a form of etiquette: a code of behaviour or rules for life. They might be subtle, but they are there and they are constantly changing. We don’t want students to spout endless facts; instead, we want something more thoughtful, deeper. If you were living in this world (or time), what would affect your thinking? How would you think? Using our facts on A Christmas Carol, a student could say something along the lines of, ’If you are poor, you would expect to face constant challenges and that your social position and quality of life would never improve while you remain poor.’

I constantly keep referring to the rules of a specific historical period. You might refer to it as the code of conduct, the rules of behaviour or social etiquette, but it all amounts to the same thing: the hidden rules that govern the way we behave.