Guess where I’ve been!
While I’ve been away, soaking up the delights of La Belle France, Jane Finnis did sterling stuff, hosting a blog post I wrote about some of the research involved in Trouble Brewing. You can find it on
http://www.janefinnis.com/
Make yourself a cup of coffee, pop on over, read, relax, enjoy and leave a comment.
The other thing I’ve been up to volunteering in a primary school where, naturally enough, I was particularly interested in an exercise the kids (aged 10 to 11) did for literacy. The idea was that they all made magic potions and then – it was an invisibility potion – wrote a letter to their Professor who was trapped inside the Chamber of Horrors being threatened by a troll, urging him to make up the potion. The kids had to provide the recipe and encourage the stranded prof. to swig it back and effect an escape.
If you think this exercise draws on the work of a well known author, you’re probably right. I know JK Rowling has a hat full of money already, but I did think it was a bit off that a whole teaching scheme should be based around the Hogwarts Saga without mentioning her by name or slipping her a couple of quid. I kept this reflection to myself, however.
The trouble is with this sort of scheme though, is that it’s designed to fit in with the Key Stage 2 Standard Attainment Tests (SATS) which stand, like a fiery sword, at the end of primary school. The SATS require kids to use long words (referred to as “Wow” words) rather than short ones, use persuasive language with, for choice, rhetorical questions, throw adjectives around like birdseed and generally dress the whole thing up. Therefore the ideal first sentence to the putative and hapless prof. should run something like:
Do you require assistance (wow word) in evading (wow word) the massive (wow word) more adjectives troll? I urge you to consider this potion.
Then follow directions for making up the potion, with Eyes of Newt etc and, oddly enough, Unicorn’s blood.. But the kids were encouraged not to simply list them, but to (again) lard it with adjectives:
Drop the unicorn’s blood carefully into the glazed earthenware jug containing the Eyes of Newt etc
Okay, it’s a school exercise, but it assumes the kids are familiar with Mr Potter’s trials, and Unicorn’s blood is the substance Voldermort drinks to bring himself back to a horrific half life. Who is this professor…? Wouldn’t we be better off letting the troll have his snack?
The other thing is, that the insistence on writing at length is simply inappropriate if you buy into the scenario. This is meant to be urgent, yes? I’m all for kids extending and using their vocabulary but there’s a time and a place and trapped in a Chamber of Horrors with a troll is no time to be mithering about finding the mot juste. It occurred to me at the time and it would’ve occurred to me when I was eleven.
However, as before, I kept this reflection to myself.
There’s a wonderful passage in ES Turner’s wonderful book on comics and penny dreadfuls, Boys Will Be Boys where he quotes from Thomas Peckett Prest’s 1840 serial. Prest’s serial had the restrained title of The String of Pearls but it’s actually the incredibly full blooded tale of Sweeny Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Sweeny Todd has imprisoned a humble pie-maker in the underground bakery. The pieman has to turn the mounds of meat that mysteriously arrive into pies.
I’ll let ES Turner take up the tale.
“The pieman began to search the far end of the vault. Lightly pencilled on the wall was this disturbing message.
Whatever unhappy wretch reads these lines may bid adieu to the world and all hope, for he is a doomed man! He will never emerge from these vaults with life, for there is a secret connected with them so awful and so hideous that to write it makes one’s blood curdle and the flesh to creep upon your bones. The secret is this – and you may be assured, whoever is reading these lines, that I write the truth, and that it is impossible to make the awful truth worse by exaggeration, as it would be by a candle at midday to attempt to add any lustre to the sunbeams.
Here, most unfortunately, the writing broke off.
If the unknown author had thought less of his literary style and more of his duty to society he might have been able to get his message across.”
The setters of SATS tests for primary schools should take notice!
Good heavens, the kids might make ideal civil servants if they develop that style of prose, but not ideal mystery writers I fear. Or maybe I should be glad if the next generation won't be hot competition for us older, I mean more experienced, authors. It's deplorable...but also fun trying to compose the opening of a mystery using wow words, rhetorical questions, and too many adjectives. Here goes: "I contemplated the unfamiliar, incomprehensible scenario, the immobile body amid the solidifying blood. Who had perpetrated this extraordinary act of callous butchery? Was it the phlegmatic butler, the ebullient yet hot-tempered housemaid, or the enigmatic mistress of this ancient, aristocratic household, whose conspicuous desire for revenge on the inoffensive school inspector might have made her uncontrollable?" Hmmm...don't think it'll sell, But would I have passed the SATS, I wonder? Luckily they weren't around in my schooldays!
ReplyDeleteJane, you've captured the heavy, wordy style exactly! I think the thing that really bothered me though was the disconnection between the act of imagination the children had to engage in to make the exercise real - which is what a writer has to do - and the actual aims of the thing, which was to show facility with words.
ReplyDeleteYes, they need to use imagination - and all children have it, don't they, if it can be set free - but it seems to me that a crucial part of English teaching is also to show them how to write in plain English. The SATS goal seems to be failing on both counts
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