Autism and Camouflage - how girls with ASD can keep it hidden from sight

This week I have been learning about the concept of 'camouflaging' as a technique used by autistic people to get by in the world of neurotypicals.  It has been a real eye-opener, not least because it's blatantly obvious that this is the very method I have used to get through my life to date.

Also known as 'compensation', camouflaging is the term for how autistic individuals manage to hide or disguise their autistic traits, allowing them to come across to the casual acquantaince as entirely neurotypical, often to the point that no-one would ever suspect that the individual is on the spectrum.  It is a real hot topic currently, and it seems that long-overdue research is finally being undertaken into its mechanics and its effect on autistic people who employ it.  At its most basic, camouflaging appears to rely on intense effort and stress on the part of the individual as they utilise their excellent memory of social cues to 'artificially' fit into social conversation and situations - essentially making their social life an endless act in order to prevent showing behaviours that they would be embarrassed or even ashamed of.  The range of skills involved is pretty daunting - the individual will have learned in minute detail how to react appropriately to the actions, speech and expressions of others, often using memorised details from their own life and even the media (films, TV shows) to help them 'say and do the right thing.'  As Meng-Chuan Lai notes in the introduction to the article 'Quantifying and exploring camouflaging in men and women with autism':

"One such coping strategy is that they may ‘camouflage’ difficulties during social situations by either hiding behaviour that might be viewed as socially unacceptable or artificially ‘performing’ social behaviour deemed to be more neurotypical – they Pretend to be Normal".

Forced eye contact, moderation of voice volume, even jokes and types of laughter can be examples of this camouflaging, all of which can usually serve to allow the autistic individual to 'fly under the radar', as Lai puts it, never getting diagnosed as there is never any concern from their teachers, parents or doctors.  The turmoil is all on the inside and is invisible to others.

Several clear patterns are beginning to emerge from the studies that continue to be published.  Firstly, successful camoflaging seems to be more prevalent in female autistic people for reasons that are still unclear; the ability to hide one's autistic traits (especially social ones) seems to be more readily within the purview of females, and female children in particular seem to have far more success in establishing friendships, for example (though maintaining them is often far less successful).  It appears that girls are more adroit at performing the expected social cues, and presumably more able to identify them in the first place.  Boys, in contrast, are far less capable of this, meaning that their autistic traits and behaviour may be more visible and obvious.

This, I think, has significant ramifications in the school environment.  The overwhelming 'maleness' of autism and aspergers in schools is well noted, and I think SEN departments, teachers and other stakeholders would benefit from being aware of the fact that female students who are on the spectrum are very good at hiding the fact, and therefore more care and time should be taken when trying to identify a students extra needs.  From my reading, I would suggest that the following considerations be taken when working with female students who may be on the spectrum:

1. Do not dismiss the possibility of ASD if they seem to have a social life - closer examination may be needed to establish the nature of the social interaction and whether friendships are maintained or falling out is commonplace.

2. Do not dismiss the possibility of ASD if eye contact is maintained, conversation with known adults is easy and a sense of humour is apparent!  Firstly, a sense of humour is often finely developed in people with autism (I, for example, am hilarious); secondly, it tends to be that conversation and interaction with other children and adults known to the student will be fine, flowing naturally - the student knows the rules and cues for those people.  They will, however, struggle with strangers for whom they have no record or knowledge.

3. Consider the other traits of ASD more carefully.  Obsessive behaviours, limited and intense interests, dislike of physical contact are all quite noticeable if you know what to look for.

It goes without saying that male children can be adept at camouflaging their symptoms, right up to adulthood.  I was only diagnosed at 34 because I had felt for years something wasn't quite right; at school it was never even considered as far as I am aware.  With male camouflaging, autistic traits can be hidden by a desire to not appear unusual, to avoid bullying, or just to avoid stressful situations getting worse.  This compensation is draining - it seems that males with autism that has been well-hidden are far more likely to suffer with anxiety and depression, mostly (it seems) due to sheer constant effort such camouflaging requires.

Finally, this phenomenon seems to be one of the reasons for some autistic children showing less severe traits as they grow older - they simply learn to cover them up.  All of this brings us to the rather uncomfortable conclusion that people with autism, girls and boys, have to expend considerable energy and mental strength to appear normal, for fear of being bullied, ostracized or treated unfairly.  This leaves them drained, depressed and even at times suicidal.  Surely this is no way for society to handle such a potentially talented and bright segment of the population?

Teaching students with ASD - some practical tips that might help. Part One

I am coming at this purely from an angle of experience - please bear that in mind.  However, I have always had considerable success in helping students with ASD make the most of their time in school, and now I find myself on the Spectrum I am more able to identify why this may be the case.  What follows are possible methods that have the potential to help.  Of course, every child (and adult) with ASD is quite different, so there will be a requirement for lashings of professional judgement too!

1. Empathy for the student

This is probably pretty much a given, but I feel all neuro-typical teachers could gain some insight into the mind-processes of those with ASD if they knew a little more about how it affects everyday interaction with the world.  The thing to bear in mind for all ASD students is that they are doing pretty well just by being in school.  I don't mean they should be congratulated for this - that would be patronising and wouldn't help the general attitude towards ASD one bit.  Rather that this should be taken into consideration when dealing with them.  Students with ASD are so much closer to breaking point that most other students; they are one or two straws closer to having their metaphorical back broken.  Everything that school comprises of (with the possible exception of the safe, repetitive routine) can be anathema to any student on the spectrum, from the shouting children, lack of safe, quiet spaces, loud and sudden bells to the hard-to-read teachers and hidden, unknown expectations of them.  As such, it is worth pausing to remember this.  Imagine taking in nearly every single sight, sound, smell, taste, touch around you, unable to block it out, all layering over one another over and over again creating a white noise that you can only escape from if allowed to do one of your coping strategies, which are probably not entirely suited to the classroom environment.  This video, from the National Autistic's Society, does a pretty good job of simulating this - can you blame the child for getting upset at the end? 

The child that you are trying to get the best out of is dealing with this all the time, and the younger they are, the less expert they will be at handling it.  Take a moment.  If the student is struggling to get started on a piece of work, or is extremely distracted, then it is possible they are close to melt-down or over-stimulation.  Give them a break, allow them to take a brief time out or indulge in some doodling or reading for a moment to ground them.  See if your SENCO knows what the student's strategies to calm themselves are and make sure you allow the student to utilise them.

2. Keep the environment routine and calm at all times.

A calm environment (that crazy red sun from a month or so back)

There is a benefit to this generally, let's face it.  Having strong routines and a calm but friendly and safe atmosphere in the classroom is a real boon for behaviour management with all students, but it will transform your room from a mad carnival/zoo arena into a pleasant place to be for a child on the spectrum.  Make sure lessons begin and end in the same way every day if you have an ASD student in the group.  Ideally let them know what they will be doing at the start of the lesson, if you have a good relationship with them.  Minimise surprises, especially surprise tests (are they ever a good idea for anyone??) and make sure that if a routine will change (a school trip, say), that the child is spoken to and made to feel aware AND considered by the teachers and other staff - often I feel just the fact that time has been taken to remember that a student may have difficulties is enough to help them through, as they feel more secure (I know I do).  I have found that even a quiet glance and a reassuring nod of the head can help a student cope with whatever new challenge is approaching - it shows them that you understand, and with ASD it helps so, so much if other people understand.  See my blog post here for some insight into the stresses that environment and people can bring.

3. Be clear in your instruction.

Make nothing ambiguous when setting work.  Again, all students will tend to benefit from this, but I cannot state enough how vital it is that a student with ASD knows what you expect of them.  Modelling is a great tool here, of course - showing the students work that is successful will work wonders with many students on the spectrum, and especially those with Asperger's, as it will remove a major source of debilitating procrastination - the fear of not doing the job correctly.

Even clarifying exactly how much should be written (an admittedly annoying task at times, but I ALWAYS let a student with ASD know what is needed) can boost the effort and motivation in class, as can any other clear expectation ("complete all four questions before you move on to the next task in 5 minutes", for example).  I think this is one of the greatest kindnesses you can show to a student on the spectrum, as it will make the task clearer and crystalised, a possible end goal rather than a vague and misty 'something'.  For English teachers, Slow Writing (thanks to David Didau) can be an excellent technique to employ, for the same reasons - it allows students to explore their creativity (and they may be startlingly creative) within safe and clear boundaries.

Behaviour Management will be the focus of the next post - this is a tricky one!

I hope this helps both teachers and students and please let me know if you think I've made an error - as I said, this is mostly from personal, long experience.

Teaching with Asperger's - a paradox to ponder (Part One)

Asperger's syndrome, being on the autistic spectrum, is a combination of three key areas of daily difficulty: social interaction, social communication and social imagination

See this handy diagram for how they operate and interact:

As you can see, there are whole worlds of problems here, all of which are concerned with dealing with other human beings.  Some are quite extreme, such as "inappropriate touching of other people", whereas most are fairly straightforward.  None of them, I think, would be associated with quality teaching.

The fact I am a relatively successful teacher who has managed to rise to middle management and still get good results was always in the way of me thinking I really had some kind of autistic condition.  No matter how miserable I was, trying to operate like everyone else, my successful career always stood out as a veto to the concept of my being ASD.  How could I teach the way I do with autism?  How would that even work?  It is something that I have given a lot of thought to, and I believe I now have some understanding of how it works.

As I have noted before in this blog, I have managed to develop, over the years, lots and lots of coping mechanisms and little tricks to help keep all of this at bay and hopefully invisible to the naked eye.  I believe this started very young, to the point where there was never any concern for my psychological well being as a child.  I was thought shy, a little awkward and something of a loner, but little more than that.  I had picked up at an early age how to avoid stressing myself out and how to act with people so they were comfortable and happy, and this skill got more sharply honed as I grew up.  As such my repetitive movements that help keep me relaxed (stims, as they are known in the Aspie community) are very subtle (clenching and unclenching toes, rubbing feet together, basically stuff you can do without anyone noticing) as I hated the thought of standing out or appearing to be 'weird' in any way.

Masks. From Skyrim, obviously.

By the time I was doing my PGCE and was in schools teaching for the first time, I had been managing my symptoms for nearly 20 years and as such was pretty good at it.  I was also very confident as I had been successful at university and was hugely buoyed by how natural teaching felt for me.  I think everyone who teaches can agree that there is an element of acting involved - whether this is a means of holding the class's interest or to hide true feelings (or hangovers), and this is exactly how it felt for me.  Teaching a class was going on stage.  Now bear with me - I'm not suggesting that I set out to be some kind of comedian-teacher (imagine how that would go down on Twitter!) - more that I found wearing a 'teacher mask' and being something of an exaggerated persona made teaching not only possible for me, but even successful.  Students tended to be happy with my passion for the subject and my slightly intense humour making imaginative links between topics and ideas.  I could teach precisely because I wasn't myself in the classroom, and all my discomforts and issues with social interaction were hidden behind my mask.  This works because teaching isn't a normal social interaction, just as being on stage isn't either.  The power balance and attention is not equal or eithin the usual bounds of social interactions.  As a teacher, you are telling a narrative, explaining a concept, talking at the world even (at times) - you are not engaging in small talk and reading facial expressions carefully, worrying about whether the other person likes you or thinks you're weird.  In short, teaching doesn't fire off the usual Asperger's traits that make social interaction so difficult

But it still takes its toll.  I still feel deeply anxious before and after every lesson I teach, and each lesson exhausts me, drains me of energy.  You can't wear a mask all the time, and every minute with it on requires still more minutes with it off, preferably alone, recharging. But I can do it, and that keeps me coming back for more.

Next time I'll consider how Asperger's actually helps with reading a classroom.

Becoming a HoD, Part 2

I've been in the job now for eight working days, and in terms of energy and the heavy weight of my eyelids, it feels more like eight weeks.  The good news is that in terms of motivation and eagerness, I'm still pretty bright and bouncy, like a mad puppy.  It's odd that the ability to make decisions and simply make things happen does this to a person, but explains where dictators get their boundless joie de vivre from, I suppose.  I am working constantly in school from 7.30am until around 4.30, and thanks to the endless multitude of different tasks, I am always able to re-energise myself with a new or more interesting job.  I must stress here, however, that for me looking at levels of progress on a spreadsheet is a genuinely interesting job.  And fun too, once you break out the conditional formatting.  It's like being allowed to use crayola when in a restaurant as a child, carefully colouring in the line drawing of a circus that the place kindly proferred on entry.  I can't get enough of it.  Someone pass me the Burnt Sienna.

So I'm maintaining a spookily high level of motivation, which is good.  But I'm also focusing even more on my lessons.  I had heard from many corners that one of the first things to suffer when you shuffle into middle management is the teaching itself.  Happily, so, far, this is yet to happen; I'm treating every lesson like a particularly vital observation.  This is bound to be down to my high levels of motivation and the strange new confidence that promotion brings.  I aim to keep it this way, but we all know an ill-timed cold or bout of insomnia can play havoc with our best teaching intentions, so I will have to see how it goes.  There is also the matter of 'setting a good example' which is now a major factor.  The reality of being a classroom teacher is that you never feel responsible for the practice of your colleagues.  As Head of Department, you suddenly are.  It is imperative to practice what you preach, and so you become even more aware of what you are doing than ever before.  I think it'd be fair to say that this week has seen some of my best ever teaching.  How exciting.

In terms of the 'other stuff' - things to keep the department running - my primary realisation is how much there is to do, and how disparate it can all feel.  One thing I'm having to do, against my character really, is be more outgoing and positive with my colleagues.  My natural habitat, or indeed my cage were I ever to find myself incarcerated in some human zoo, would be a dank cave packed with electronic gizmos and Lego.  It certainly wouldn't contain other people.  So I find myself hoisted bodily from my comfort zone, going around the department chatting away and being as 'motivational' and 'nice' as I can muster.  Joking aside, it has been very pleasant, and I have a good role model to look up to - our Head of Maths has got this aspect of his role nailed, and is incredibly good at making his department exude positivity and optimism.  Their results are supernaturally good, and I think a good portion of this success stems from this - thus, as desperately odd it must seem to anyone who knows me, I must follow in his footsteps.

More about the admin side of things next time.  Right now, I've got to get some forms filled in.

An excerpt from my travel journal:

Day 1

Having the sick bucket beside my leg is no qualification.  Upon rumour of sickness at the front of the bus, the bucket was passed nonchalantly away from me, to remove any possibility that I may become embroiled in the ensuing affair.  Sadly, I still had to report the incident to the self-appointed vomit-manager - catchphrase, 'I can do sick'.  Confused by the ambiguous nature of the verb in this sentence, I simply nodded and retreated back to my seat, humbled and strangely sad.

Units of work with overarching narratives

The council had decided it.  The beautiful village needed a bypass, and quickly.  Deaths on the main road had been occurring all too often, and it was time to act.  Three potential routes were established, and the villagers quickly decided on the route best for them, their families and their businesses.  Just as the contest between the routes  was getting fierce, the local vicar was killed in a hit and run incident.  There were rumours of murder…

So goes the storyline of a KS3 transactional writing/speaking unit of work that I have taught for several years.  Units of work that focus on the writing of news articles, letters, speeches and the like can be incredibly boring to teach and to learn from.  Endless lessons of writing different, meaningless letters to imaginary people can really wear down the motivation of even the happiest students, and are anathema to those who find school to be an annoyance.  I just couldn’t bear to put my students through this hell, so a few years back I trawled my imagination and dredged my memory for some way of making a unit of this type fun.  Year 8 English lessons from my own past swam into focus: a village, that every student is a ‘resident’ of, with careers, social anxieties, relationships, friendships and deep seated rivalries.  This was a unit of work I remembered well, delivered by my teacher of the time, Mr Fox.  And it was certainly memorable.  I barely remember any peers (apart from close friends) from my school days, but I certainly remember us all in the drama studio, acting our parts with gusto, arguing and back-biting about the pros and cons of Bypass Route A.  Happy days indeed, so it made eminent sense to steal this unit, give it some more flourishes and develop it for a full transactional writing unit.

The Village - drawn on MS Paint (I'm a masochist).

The reasons this unit work so well are two-fold.  One, it embeds character development into the scheme, giving the students open-ended opportunity to flesh out their villager, giving them traits, back-stories, motives and relationships.  This leads to very rich and detailed Speaking and Listening activities, and gives them an opportunity to add a very strong voice to their writing.  Two, it has an over-arching narrative: a story, that gives all of the written and spoken tasks a distinct purpose and flavour.  Yes, it is a fiction, and I imagine some would argue that transactional writing in a world of fiction is meaningless.  I would take issue with this, as the fictional world is grounded in reality and deals with real issues, but still: there is ample room to create narrative units entirely based in reality.

So, the story of the village and its problems provides a backdrop to a range of written and spoken tasks.  Travel guides or Wikipedia entries can be written for the village itself (writing to inform/describe for different audiences); character biographies can be drafted (writing to entertain and develop character); newspaper reports and editorials can be written, with a focus on the difference between certain newspaper types/audiences; even obituaries and epitaphs, for the poor dead vicar, can be written – it sounds macabre but the students enjoy trying this formal and prescriptive style for a change.  Spoken tasks can include speeches from characters about their opposition to council plans; drama activities based around protests and village hall meetings; full on debates, even.  There’s plenty of scope for elongating or shortening the unit as you see fit.  I found myself adding a sub-plot about finding old manuscripts in the ancient cottage - this involved the class decoding and creating a cohesive storyline from a differentiated range of renaissance-18th Century text excerpts.  This acted as a pleasant taster for the next term's unit of work - Twelfth Night.

The students love it, of course.  It’s very engaging, but obviously this isn’t the be-all and end-all.  They learn an awful lot, too.  With their defenses down, they absorb the skills and knowledge quickly, as it all makes more sense, with their writing linked to a central narrative.  It all means something, and adds to the overall story.  They can follow their tasks through, recognising that writing a sub-par news report on the Vicar’s death would show a lack of respect, and would not be print-worthy.  They make their editorials truly powerful and persuasive, as they really want a certain by-pass route to be successful.  Thus, their learning and practice of technical aspects, such as punctuation, leap in quality.  It’s astonishing how ‘real’ the whole thing can become, to the point where the students end up leading the narrative, taking it to strange new places.  For example, we ended up doing some creative writing based on animals being displaced from their homes.  A pupil had chanced upon an old episode of Animals of Farthing Wood and wanted to use it.  And it worked brilliantly, with excerpts from Wind in the Willows analysed, and the whole theory and technique of anthropomorphism explored.

Creating story-driven schemes is time-consuming, but very rewarding.  I aim to storify all of my KS3 units in this way - I'm currently sorting out a First World War unit where the progress of the war is tracked by poetry and the biographies of Sassoon and Owen - and I believe that this will create English lessons that will be remembered for a long time.  There are limits, of course.  It would be unfeasible to create a narrative line in some units, I'm sure - but be imaginative.  Media units or transactional writing units can always be given a narrative (I have a Yr 9 writing unit built around the story of a decaying amusement park), and poetry units should be given some kind of central focus or tenet.  Novel and play units have their own narrative, of course, and I feel any persuasive module, either spoken or written, should have a story or major project at its heart.  

Commas

What is it with commas?  At first glance they appear to be an easy-to-understand branch of the punctuation tree; a straightforward mark that only the worst dunces can possibly mess up.  This is certainly the attitude that my students have for this poor, misunderstood piece of typography.  'We learned how to use commas in year 2,' they cry in unison, 'we need no more instruction in this barren mark.'  They then proceed to merrily splice their way through their work, like Dr. Moreau.

Lists they understand.  This is the one punctuation mark that they are supremely confident of, and rightly so.  The problem is that lists feature very lightly in work written post KS2 - they are not a common sight in your average essay or film review.  So their happiest times with commas are removed from them, and they are left, arrogantly flailing, in a morass of misunderstood rules and commas after connectives.  The poor devils.  Recently I've made punctuation my life's work, or so it seems.  I spend a great amount of my time trying to find ways to engage students in it, and also instruct them as to their use.  And this is tricky, as the rules are convoluted and time-consuming, and yet I find I cannot just fob them off.  I can't say to a class that commas are where you breathe.  I just can't.  The main reason for my truculence on the matter is because simplistic rules like this don't work and lead to terrible misapprehensions.  No, it's much better to teach them exactly how punctuation works, so they can cope with any eventuality.

With semi-colons and full stops this is an achievable aim.  I can even get apostrophes into their eager little heads with some ease.  But commas give me nightmares.  Their rules are seemingly simple, but getting them across to students is incredibly hard.  Let's start with the subordinate clause and its associated comma.  In order to teach students this, they have to grasp the concept of a subordinate clause.  This also means they have to understand the concept of 'sentence'.  Have you asked a student what a sentence is recently?  If not, give it a go.  It's a hoot.  And the trouble is, how does one define a sentence in easy-to-grasp language?  It is a single unit of meaning?  What's meaning?  It's a single utterance formed around a verb?  God help us - what's a verb again?  It's a penguin? Yes.  It's a penguin.  A single, functioning, happy penguin.  That'll do.  And this is what I use to get across the whole spectrum of sentences, compounds and complexes.  Three penguins in various states of disarray:

Simple sentence = a penguin, happily standing there.  He's perfectly all right by himself and cannot be broken down any further.  He makes sense, too.

Compound sentence = a penguin with another fully-functioning penguin glued to his back.  They both look a bit miffed.  They are glued together by the fabled 'Andorbut' glue.  So far so mental.

Complex sentence = a penguin wearing a pair of robotic trousers.  This is a penguin that has an optional upgrade.  The upgrade cannot work alone, of course.  No - it needs to living, breathing, functioning penguin to operate.  The little seat the penguin sits on is in the shape of a comma.

So, there we are.  The compexity of the issue demands bizarre analogies to be formed.  Now, it's altogether possible that I've missed a trick here, and that there is some easy way of teaching this without resorting to zoo animals.  If so, let me know.

But still, commas and subordination.  Tricky.

What about commas and connectives? Pretty easy this, as long as they remember it's comma before connective.  Even then, many will get confused why 'and' is exempt from this rule, and whether the writing after 'because' is a subordinate clause or not.  For me it all boils down to the 'survival' idea - if a section of text can survive alone, and cannot be broken down into a shorter unit of meaning including a verb, then it's a sentence.

Then we have the splice.  I've been reduced to strange analogies again when it comes to this most egregious of punctuation errors.  My line with the students is that putting a comma between two full sentences (penguins or whatever) is barbaric.  It just can't cope with the pressure and will be squashed flat.  They like this idea.  I tell them that the only marks strong enough to handle are semi-colons and full stops.  Then one smart-arse will pipe up, 'but what about exclamation marks?'  Yes, those too.  This works pretty well, especially if I draw dead little commas all over their work when I see any splicing going on (I haven't actually done this yet, but I sure am going to start now).

But even with this arsenal of weird ideas, I still don't feel I've got a complete handle on their comma ability.  There must be other ways to achieve full comma-ability - any ideas?

Books that I'd like to teach

When it comes to teaching literature we all have our favourites: books that we have taught many times and feel incredibly comfortable with.  Take you pick from the list: To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, An Inspector Calls, Death of a Salesman, Romeo and Juliet, Stone Cold, Touching the Void, The Great Gatsby etc etc.

But what of those books that we love, but feel we are not allowed to teach?  GCSEs and A-Levels seem to have harsh strictures on what we can deliver to students, and often this forces our hand away from gems that we've loved for decades, books that we know inside out, books that we could teach to a busload of Millwall fans without losing their interest.  Perhaps we need to make a change here and take a few literary risks.  After all, GCSEs and A-Level syllabuses are more flexible than they seem these days, and there's always KS3...

I remember teaching The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time to a Year 8 class several years ago, when I was an Independent school drone.  It was on the Year 8 syllabus, which surprised me (there's a wheelbarrow-load of bad language in that books, including the c-bomb), and so I built a tidy little scheme around it.  Goodness, but their attitude to the book was incredible.  I've never taught a text that has been so eagerly, so immediately lapped up as this one.  Once we'd established the salient facts about the narrator, Christopher - most importantly the nature of his Aspergers - the students understood everything, even the necessity for all the swearing.  It gave them an insight into authorial choices and intentions which set them up for the rest of the year.  It even gave them a chance to understand the term 'post-modern', which they guzzled up with relish.  So much enjoyable teaching and learning from a book that doesn't typically feature on school syllabuses must give us pause for thought.  Perhaps it's time to cast off the shackles of the tried and tested, and find ways to teach books we're really passionate about?

So, what would I teach, if I could?

1. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (KS3-5)

My all time favourite book, and with enough content and style to keep you busy for months, Wonderland is a perfect book for teaching.  The manipulation of language alone is going to help students grasp connotation and emotional impact, and the episodic structure of the story will aid with that tricky side of things too.  Characterisations are many and varied, and the humour will draw in even the most grumpy student.  I'd probably teach Looking Glass too, mainly because it contains 'Jabberwocky' and Humpty Dumpty, whose meeting with Alice could be analysed for years - 'There's glory for you!'  A whole term spent on this book in Year 8, perhaps, could be very useful indeed, paving a way for later understanding about language, structure and form.  And Year 8 can be adapted as we wish, so it's simply a case of buying the books (the biggest sticking point) and coming up with a detailed and relevant MTP.

2. The Devil's Dictionary (KS5)

Ambrose Bierce's fascinating and hilarious spoof dictionary would be great in any of the Englishes at KS5.  It has a really savage humour that could be a great focus for English Language, and its status as a work of literature can raise interesting questions regarding the nature of literature.  Bierce's biography is enthralling, too - especially his disappearance in 1913, where he set off to Mexico (at the age of 71) where he joined Pancho Villa.  He was never heard of again.  The potential for this to be used at KS5 is huge, thanks to the non-prescriptive nature of certain units on all English courses.  Perhaps as inspiration for coursework in Lit Lang, or as an example of language change in Language A2? This could easily find its place into a curriculum.  And by the way, if you haven't already, make sure you read it!

3. The Waves (KS5)

I've waxed over-lyrical about this before on here, but it's worth reiterating.  The Waves is an enormously important book.  The structure is very simple - a narrative separated into times of day by short descriptions of a beach at dawn, midday, dusk etc.  But the narrative held within this is very complex and abstract, charting the lives of several children as they pass through time, with traits, utterances and images carried through their whole life.  The self-awareness of the characters, and the fact they speak with the forced formality of a witness in the dock throughout the book, describing their lives, have stayed with me for years.  A-Level literature students would have a field day.

4. Lucky Jim (KS4)

Kingsley Amis' best book, in my opinion.  This would be a great text to read with a year 10-11 class.  The difficulty of the relationships and the sad heroism of Jim himself would appeal to a teenage audience.  In fact, Jim's open insolence and hatred of all forms of authority in his job as lecturer would strike a chord with most students! The fact that we can't help but root for the poor guy helps too.  The problem is, despite its quality and relevance, there is no easy way to fit it into a GCSE course.  It isn't a different culture text, and doesn't really fit into literary heritage either.  So its left out in the cold.  A shame.

5. A Confederacy of Dunces (KS4-5)

This is a tricky book, but the characterisation of the lead character is worth its weight in gold.
Ignatius J. Reilly is the modern teenager.  Any student who moans about the world, believing themselves to be better than all others, whilst gorging themselves on pringles playing Call of Duty, would see themselves reflected in this text, and that has to be a good thing.  Again, the contextual details surrounding John Kennedy Toole's suicide and subsequent posthumous publication would add fascinating flavour to it.  It's a different culture text, at least, but you'd have to be creative with the Controlled Assessments to squeeze it into a GCSE curriculum.

I'll have a think about more as the week progresses.  But there we go, a few books that I would love to teach.  Now I just have to figure out where, why and how.

Knowledge and/or Skills

What is more vital? Teaching of knowledge or skills?  Anyone with sense will know that they are symbiotic - they work together to improve students' ability - but too often I hear that teaching knowledge is somehow inferior, or even unnecessary, when trying to improve certain skills.  I don't want to get drawn into debating where the new curriculum is heading - I simply want to outline how the overt teaching of knowledge improves the learning and outcome of skills at KS3, 4 and 5 in English.

(I may well be preaching to the choir here, in which case I apologise.  However, the debate of knowledge vs. skills crops up so often on Twitter that I think it's worth considering.)

I am an English teacher, and as such I will focus on the value of skills and knowledge within that subject area.  There may be areas of overlap with other subjects, but not necessarily.  English is seen as a primarily skills based subject, I think, by most teachers.  The skills involved are all linguistic - reading, writing, speaking and listening.  These are skill-sets that we seek to improve between years 7-13, and all are assessed on a regular basis.  But do these skills ignore knowledge?  Should the teaching of 'knowledge' - that is the sharing of scientific, emotional and artistic facts, plus the transmission of the opinions of people throughout history and around the globe - be a part of skill-teaching in English?

I would say it is intrinsic, and that teaching skills without also teaching relevant 'knowledge' is deeply misguided, simply because it's an unnecessary self-imposed limitation that doesn't really benefit anyone.  Knowledge, as defined above, is a vital part of any informed analysis of text, or piece of writing, or conversation.  As teachers, it would be remiss of us to opt out of transmitting the ideas and facts about the world that would help inform the skills we are teaching.

Let's take the analysis of a poem as a case in point.  Imagine we are analysing Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress', and we are a Yr 10 class.  The skill we will be improving and practicing will be textual analysis.  Now, analysis of the language of the poem is fundamentally a skill utilising the literacy skills that will be long-established by the student.  They will be able to analyse the line 'this coyness lady were no crime' and argue that the use of 'crime' has certain connotations - connotations that they picked up long ago.  But this kind of rudderless analysis based on literacy that has been cemented since Primary School will not serve them well, and it is impossible to improve their skill without giving them access to some knowledge that, up to this point, they have lacked.  They will need some contextual understanding of the position of women in the 17th Century for starters.  They will also need to be taught a little about human empathy and feelings (how many times have we had to teach students that people aren't purely good/bad, but that there are shades in between?  This is not a skill - it's a fact that must be taught, either proactively by a teacher or passively through the reading of books).  They will require, in short, some teaching of facts and opinions to make their analysis full and worthwhile.

An analysis of a later part of the poem, where Marvell uses the imagery of death to frighten the woman to bed, will only yield worthwhile results if the students spend some time researching/being taught the cultural associations of death, tombs, burial and such like.  Expecting them to come up with good analysis based only on their naive, pre-conceived notions of death, established at KS1 and 2 is extreme folly, when it would take only one lesson to improve their position.  Note that I am arguing that analysis of text is possible without overt teaching of accompanying knowledge, but that I don't see the point of leaving it there, when the analysis could be enriched so easily by giving them some extra knowledge to work with.

In writing, it is fair to say that skills alone will get us a long way (once the initial 'knowledge-transmission' of basic literacy is complete).  A student can write a passable letter to the headteacher about school uniforms without knowing very much of the wider world, and they can write a film review with no knowledge at all of the film-making process.  So far, so good, if we're happy to leave it at that.  But why should we?  Why would we, as teachers, not want to enrich their writing by teaching them of relevant concepts, events, terminology, culture?  Teaching a student to write a film review without teaching them facts about film making, such as camera angles, film terminology, a little of the history of Hollywood seems shortsighted at best and negligent at worst.  Knowledge is the perfect ally to skills, and allows the skills to be used to their utmost.  A student who uses the recently-taught knowledge they've gained in their writing will elevate it massively compared to one who doesn't (or can't, because they received none).

The same goes for teaching Speaking and Listening to, of course.  But I will detain you no longer.  Skills in English are fundamental; skills informed and improved by freshly-taught, relevant knowledge are the icing on the education cake - one that every student should be allowed a slice of.

My Teaching Groundrule

A week into the new term and I'm feeling more positive about the whole teaching thing.  More effort put into my planning (see an earlier post for my resolutions!), successes with my Punctuation Pets idea and rapid student progress have all made me a happy camper this week.  As such, I'm going to have a think about what my fundamental teaching groundrules are.  I've never really thought about it before, let alone codified it, so this should be an intriguing process.  By 'groundrules' I mean the central tenets that I seem to adhere to, and a reflection of all the reflection and improvements I've made in the last 5 years.  It all seems to boil down to one particular rule, so here it is: number 1 of 1:

See the classroom, and lesson, from the students' point-of-view.

I think this is a fundamental thing, and it's a rule that I live by day in, day out.  Perhaps it stems from Atticus Finch, perhaps it doesn't.  All I know is that I cannot plan, deliver or reflect on a lesson without placing myself into the shoes of a student who had to endure it.  They are our customers, in the broadest sense of the word, and their experience matters.  I am under no illusions, though.  I know that their viewpoint can be flawed, or short-sighted, and there is more to this than simply making lessons fun or silly.  No, this extends into really focusing on how they will be, are, or have been learning.  How will they react to this PowerPoint slide?  Will the colours aid their understanding? Should I explain this concept in three different ways, over the lesson, using different analogies each time for different students?  Can they understand this concept without certain key vocabulary?  Is there any way I can exemplify this skill in a way they can grasp and enjoy?  Above all, how can I make their learning easier, more enjoyable and more seamless?  These questions are always on my mind, and I am forever wondering how they are likely to react to what I'm giving them.  I think this is absolutely vital, and would recommend this simple technique to anyone.

It also leads to removing all busywork from lessons.  Occasionally I will set work like this, especially with KS3, but it always makes me feel awful afterwards, like gorging on a pizza covered in chocolate and chorizo.  We've all had days where we're ill and lack the energy to bounce around the room like a crazed educating frog; typically we react to these days by giving them work where time-consumption seems to be the main factor.  But equally, we've all felt that hollow sense of worthlessness that stems from this work.  As I can't abide this feeling, I avoid busy work like the plague, and ruthlessly over-analyse any set task in a lesson just in case it has elements of busy work within it.  This can be more a curse than a blessing at times, but it seems to work well.

Behaviour management also connects with this.  Have you ever told a student off, knowing full well you're being unreasonable and probably a bit of a prick?  I certainly have, and can't face it.  I have to know that I'm being totally fair, otherwise I find myself blustering like a moron and, viewing myself briefly from their point of view, I realise what an insufferably foolish goon I look.  Teaching two boy-only groups has taught me that being consistent, reasonable and willing to let things go is the only way to succeed with just about any child, let alone misanthropic male teens.  These days I always ask myself, am I actually correct? Have I fully explained why there is a problem? Have I made it crystal clear what the potential repercussions will be?  These self-checks tend to work pretty well, and I hope I don't come across as a frustrated, bellowing cow-person anymore.

Maybe it's an obvious thing, but I know I was never taught to look at a class from the customer's viewpoint during my PGCE.  I think it's very helpful, and reckon that it keeps me sane in an increasingly insane educational world.

Punctuation Pets - going all Pokemon on them.

Hello everyone.  It's a cold December 1st, and now the joy I gained from my advent calendar has waned, it's time for another post.

An endangered Apostrophe

Yesterday, trying to engage my Yr8 literacy-boosting group with the idea of apostrophes, I hit upon the idea of presenting them as an endangered species, struggling to survive in the modern world.  I led the students along a while - one of my favourite techniques - wanting them to think we were going to talk about snow leopards or minke whales or something.  Then I hit them with the apostrophe, and a suitably cute illustration of what an apostrophe looks like under a magnifying glass.

This had them hooked.  Now, I understand that engagement is not the same as learning, but it is certainly a damn good foundation to it.  Over the course of the session, I instilled in them a sense that missing out an apostrophe was a little like saying 'I don't believe in fairies'.  After they'd stopped sobbing at the thought of the needless murder of hundreds of little apostrophes, we decided it was time to act.  So, every time an apostrophe is placed in their own natural habitat (possession/omission), we will make a point of adding another line to the tally of happy, healthy apostrophes living in the wild.

The rationale behind all this childish madness is this: students usually understand apostrophe rules (and those for capitals, commas, full stops and connectives); the issue is that they just forget to use them as they write at speed, usually under pressure.  It is this forgetfulness which needs work, and what better way to help them remember than giving punctuation personality?  In our school, with the help of literacy-freak @letterland123, we are hoping to create a Pokemon-inspired 'points gathering' affair, whereby punctuation is very cute, collectible and a source of small prizes.  Watch this space...

English and Boys-Only Groups.

When I moved to my current school, I was given an all-boys Yr 10 class.  They were the disinterested, naughty, often hostile students that had been a bit of a nightmare in Yr 9, plus a few quiet lads who'd flown under the radar for three years.  I was the only male teacher in the English department, and so it was believed that I may have half-a-chance of getting these students on track, and maybe even wring a few grades out of them.

A year and a half on, and these boys are in the middle of year 11.  They are benign, funny, talkative, opinionated and often hard-working, and I wouldn't swap this group with any other.  It seems to have worked.  They are mostly on course for their targets, or above; their behaviour is generally very good indeed, and their attitude to learning is incredibly positive.  I think biting the bullet, and including gender in your differentiation to this quite extreme extent is a good thing, and not to be shied away from.  So, what are the benefits of this segregation?


1. No distractions.  This is the obvious one, and its been debated to death in the larger debate about segregated schools.  But within a mixed school, taking the boys away from the 'charms' of the female students seems to have a positive impact on their attention span and their learning.  They have no one to show off too, and as boys are usually pretty intolerant of idiotic bravado when women aren't around, this can become a positive cycle.  It helps if the teacher leads the way on this, highlighting foolish behaviour by labelling it using the student's lingo ('weak', describing poor quality humour, has gone down a treat!).  They latch onto this pretty quickly and the class benefits immensely from it.

2. Toilet humour.  There is no better way to get a gaggle of malcontented boys on side than making jokes about (and sometimes actually demonstrating) farting.  With no girls in the room to temper such grotesque behaviour, the potty-based 'banter' can reach disturbing new highs, with the level of trust within the room increasing with every foul joke.  Soon, every student feels comfortable in the classroom, knowing that banter is redirected from personal attack, to general 'blokish' silliness.  The teacher has to set boundaries, of course, and they will be stretched; persevere, though, and you can end up with the class wrapped around your little finger.

3. Similar interests.  I'm not going to say that all boys share the same interests, but it is reasonable to suggest that many discontented young men, around year 10/11, do have some interests in common.  In a group such as this, these interests can be made full advantage of.  Video games, films, football - these can all be used as starting points into modules, or even assessments themselves.  Recently, my Yr 11s completed a GCSE S&L discussion based around the future of video games, and it was fantastic!  Wonderful debates abounded, and lots of marks were awarded, as they actually wanted to listen to each others' ideas.  We have a 5-minute chat at the start of every lesson, before the starter, where we share our experiences - films we've watched over the weekend, Saturdays' football scores, video game highlights.  This leads to bonding and a sense of community, and before long, everyone's pushing in the same direction.

4. Camaraderie.  My group have really achieved this - they are 'all in this together', and are very happy to help each other out and offer new ideas to the lesson.  This could happen in any group, of course, but I feel that it has happened more quickly, and more strongly than in mixed groups, as the boys feel special.  They know they are in a boys only group, and a low one at that, and this has brought them together.

So, get those troubled boys together, add a dollop of poo-humour, chat about Grand Theft Auto, and then sneak in a bit of learning every now and then.  The results can be very good indeed.