How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Micro teaching
How to teach essay writing

Demands on time and the pressure to get through the curriculum often have a negative impact: we end up trying to do everything at once. In this chapter, I’ve mentioned three different approaches to essay writing in the classroom and they all work in isolation, but what happens towards the end of term or year is that all three aspects are tried in quick succession. Teachers will try to teach the semicolon, use parody, show examples while drafting and learn seven quotations from the Bible simultaneously. We chuck everything at the students. I take the opposite path: the more pressurised things become, the more I focus on the content. Effective teaching isn’t about overloading. It is about clarity and decluttering. I tend to focus on narrow aspects, unpicking a thread and spending a lesson making students better at that one small thing. Little changes can have a big impact.

Here’s one such thread: use ’but’ or ’yet’ when explaining complex ideas.

The poem conveys how the experience is painful yet important to the mother.

I’d spend a whole lesson looking at this and developing ideas. It might involve exploring what other words I could use instead of ’but’ or ’yet’. It might look at the relationship of the two ideas in the poem: how some experiences hurt and how we learn lessons from them. It might look at the rest of the poem and produce more example sentences. It might take that sentence and build the rest of the paragraph. Whichever way we look at it, I make sure the students know that specific structure and will use it on pain of death in their writing.

Here’s a list of some other minor tweaks I have used in lessons and as exam hacks:

1 Develop your interpretations by building up meaning — suggests/shows/symbolises.

The poem shows us a mother reflecting on a child going to war, which suggests how much this has had an impact on her. The poem symbolises the struggle families have in war.

2 Use adverbs at the start of sentences — Literally … Figuratively … Symbolically …

Literally, the poem is about a mother’s loss. Figuratively, the poem explores how a mother’s bond with a child is constant. Symbolically, the poem is about how soldiers’ lives are ignored and taken for granted.³

3 More adverbs — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically. Use these adverbs to help explain ideas in poems.

’Exposure’ explores how war affects people physically and mentally, but ’Poppies’ focuses on how it affects people spiritually and psychologically.

4 Lists are your friends — list emotions/techniques/ideas/phrases.

The poet challenges, explores and develops his fear, anger and frustration of war with lists and rhetorical questions.

5 Think about the verbs you use to describe what the poet is doing — challenges/reflects/embodies/attacks. The verb you use helps you to explain how the poet is presenting their message.

The poet attacks the leaders of war — the voice is aggressive and angry.

The poet reflects the loss a parent faces in war — the voice is calm.

6 Use adverbs to evaluate the poem — stereotypically/unusually/typically/realistically/unconventionally/surprisingly/convincingly/unconvincingly.

Owen realistically conveys the war from the perspective of the soldiers on the battlefield and challenges how other poets present war stereotypically and unrealistically.

7 Combine techniques together — use ’and’ and link words/techniques.

The poet uses lists and exaggeration to highlight how bad things were.

The poet uses the adjectives ’small’ and ’tiny’ to make the reader feel superior.

8 Put an adjective before a technical term.

The writer uses violent verbs and physical adjectives to …

9 Think about using one of these words to sum up the structure of the poem — a journey/a discovery/a realisation — then add some adverbs/adjectives.

The poem is a psychological journey from despair to hope.

The poem is an emotional realisation.

10 Use the phrase ’it could also’ and add a further interpretation.

It could also be a study of the complexity of war.

11 Use tentative statements — perhaps/maybe/possibly.

Perhaps the writer intends the reader to …

12 Use lots of one-word quotations.

The writer uses the words ’pain’ and ’torture’ to highlight the endless suffering experienced by the men.

13 Show off with your emotions — avoid using simple emotions like happiness, sadness, anger. Use emotions like frustration, envy, dismay.

The poem explores the boredom, apathy and emptiness of war on the front line.

When completed with a class, I print them off as a crib sheet. The little things add together over time to make the whole better.