Someone on the Bluewave board asked about English curriculum.

The question was, "Do they mostly do British Lit? Do they read a lot of novels? I remember you saying in one of your blog posts that you were surprised at how well the students analyzed poetry so I'm guessing there is a fair amount of that. At my high school I had a good amount of freedom to do what I liked as did the regular teachers and a lot of them barely touch poetry. How do you think this compares to what you are doing there?"

Where to start . . . Because 'graduation' (their 'certificate') is based a folder of essays, and on exams taken at the end of their last year of required-schooling (year 11), the upper school curriculum is very prescriptive in KS4 (years 10 and 11). You do have a bit of leeway in choosing the pieces to teach, though.

It can be done in any sequence, but here we have them write five papers and do their three speaking/listening tasks (speeches/debates) in year 10, and then in year 11 we study the poetry and a novel, in preparation for the exam. Their final 'grade' in English is based on the evidence in their folders (essays, and results of speaking/listening tasks) and the exams on poetry and the novel.

For the 5 papers, they are told exactly what criteria they must meet (the teachers mark/grade all the folder work), and we choose the pieces of literature that they write about. The five essays are:
1) an original writing piece (we read most of the Prize of Peril, then wrote their own endings),
2) analysis of a post-1914 play (I did 'A View From the Bridge' this year, but will choose something different next year),
3) analysis of Shakespeare play (most do Romeo and Juliet, but I chose 'Much Ado About Nothing,' since my KS3 are doing it this year, so it saved me some work),
4) a media essay (I had them write a video review of Shrek -- again, you have some choice), and
5) essay about prose (we're doing some ghost stories next half-term).

For year 11, there are a few choices for the novel (I'm going to do 'Catcher in the Rye'), and in the poetry, you can only choose between two clusters of 'Poems from Other Cultures' (there are two sets of 8, and they need to know every poem in either cluster for the exam). For the English Literature poems, you have a choice of two sets of poets (we do Duffy and Armitage, but Heaney and Clarke are also an option -- scroll down a bit on that link to see all four poets and the poems), and they need to know just two of those poems thoroughly. Oh, and they have three 'Speaking/Listening' tasks to be graded on in KS4 (speeches/debates, a bit of criteria to follow on the types of tasks, but from there, the field is wide open.

Ah, just found a site that explains it all in a nutshell! It's a school's website, but they have it all outlined for their students. Nice site! (When they say 'coursework' they mean the folder of essays.)

To me, it doesn't seem like much (compared to the amount we pound through in a year in America) . . . ten poems, a novel, 3 speeches/debates, and five essays to write, all in two years. Of course you create assignments within all of these, to work on other things (pre-writing, sentence variety, grammar, whatever you deem your students need), but there's nothing like the 'anthologies' we used in America, with all the tasks set up for the year, and we just follow the sections our state has set.

Just one more example of how when people say it's very different here, it truly is. I'm off to start planning a speech unit plan -- that'll kill the 2 weeks 'til the break (first two weeks of April!), and then I just have the prose (ghost stories) to teach, then the year 10's will be off on work experience for a few weeks, the 11's will be taking exams, the year 13's will be buggering off soon after that, and it'll be a quite empty school -- just 9's and 12's! They say it's all down-hill after the April break. Here's hoping. I'm ready for some 'downhill.'

Oh, Happy (U.K.) Mother's Day (well, if you're a mother, as I am. I told my daughter I expect double the cards this year! One on U.K. Mother's Day, one on U.S. Mother's Day (kidding). But I did remember to buy a card and stash it away from my own mum in May -- otherwise, there'll be no way to get one to send to her). Father's Day is the same in both -- third Sunday in June.