Leo Remembered
Leo Remembered
Leo Remembered
My October column for the East Anglian Daily Times:
One thing I seem to be able to do is to write stuff.
Not a day goes by when, somewhere in the margins of the working day, I don’t write something – whether it’s the school magazine, a bulletin for staff, a blog for English teachers, an article, or a fragment for a school textbook.
As the novelist EM Forster said: ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ That’s what I’m like too: I think through writing.
This trait goes back to primary school when I used to write a series of stories about a lion called Leo. Adopted by a kindly family in London, he got into a series of hapless adventures designed to make readers smile.
My teacher, Mrs Nicholls, was very taken with this collection of stories – innovatively called ‘Leo the Lion’ - and would occasionally read them out to the rest of the class. I watched their bemused reaction and noticed one of my fellow classmates put his hand up.
‘Miss,’ he said, catching my eye knowingly, ‘I’ve heard this exact story before, except it wasn’t a lion; it was a bear. It was Paddington Bear. He had the same adventure as Leo’s just had, except he had a marmalade sandwich under his hat’.
Oh dear. I had been rumbled.
Yes, I could write, but what I couldn’t do was generate original ideas. Instead I – let’s put this generously – borrowed the plotlines from other writers.
It means that if you were to judge my writing against certain criteria, I would inevitably fail. For example, I shan’t win the Booker Prize. I’m not going to be given the TS Eliot poetry award. I don’t think the Orange Prize for fiction will ever weigh down my mantelpiece.
No, my kind of writing is less glamorous, more humdrum – the writing we do at speed to inform and persuade and occasionally to entertain.
--
I mention my interest in writing because last week literacy was in the news again. It was time for the results of another international survey. This time the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that England and Northern Ireland do badly when compared with other countries. We are apparently 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries.
Put bluntly, the report suggests that grandchildren are no better at core skills than their grandparents.
Now, as someone who has been teaching English for almost 30 years, this is deeply depressing. My experience tells me that most young people I teach are doing far more reading than in the past (because of the time they spend online) and that their spoken English is often more impressive than anything I could have mustered at their age.
But the survey suggests I am wrong.
So why are we doing so badly? This is where my ‘Leo the Lion’ tale becomes relevant. Here’s why. At our school we have again hosted a group of 28 students from Shanghai, the top-performing principality in the world. They come to us because they believe they have much to learn from our education system. In particular they admire the confidence of our young people, their skills in problem-solving and their creativity. These are things that aren’t tested in international studies, but which the Chinese educators believe are important enough to have visited annually for the past five years.
The OECD’s report compares us with countries that do things differently from us. In England, students specialise in their studies post-16. In other countries English and Mathematics may remain compulsory. The tests are also focused on narrow functional skills – something our education system doesn’t teach to older students.
None of these are excuses for our woeful performance in literacy and numeracy. But sometimes – like my story of Leo the Lion – you have to look at the context to know that the surface story isn’t quite as straightforward as it might seem.
Because as our Shanghai partnership demonstrates, there’s much in our education system that the rest of the world admires and craves.
--
Sixth Form joke
I heard a rumour that Cadbury’s are bringing out a far eastern chocolate bar. It could be a Chinese Wispa
Geoff Barton
Published in the EADT 16 October 2013
Thursday, 17 October 2013