Feature| Published in The The Times on 10 October 2006 | By: Catherine Paver
The bullet-point demands of school coursework are killing teenagers’ love of books, argues an English literature teacher. Now, who wants to hear a good ghost story . . .
The voice melted into a yawn. “Will you read us a story?” it asked.
Well, we’d finished the topic and were too tired to start another one, but I was a bit surprised to hear this from a sixth former.
I switched off the lights and the students put their heads down. The whispering and snorting died away as The Red Room by H. G. Wells slowly filled the classroom. When the bell rang we didn’t switch the lights back on but let the memory hang in the shadows. “It’s so hard to get lost in a book now,” said one student as we packed up.
She was right, and one of the reasons is coursework. Coursework has been in the the dock recently.
It was announced last week that at GCSE it will be gone in three years. For English literature it is set to continue at A level — but if it were to disappear from A-levels, too, I wouldn’t shed a tear.
The fuss has centred around cheating but this was never its worst crime. My quarrel with it is the damage it does to the teenage experience of books.
Many of us remember reading Jane Eyre at school, which is why we are gripped by the current BBC series. But I wonder whether today’s sixth formers would care if a new version were aired in ten years’ time.
This is what it’s like to read Jane Eyre in today’s schools. You’re shown the video and given some handouts. You read page one of the novel and wonder why Jane is sitting “like a Turk” but the handouts don’t help. They are full of demands about “literary traditions” and suchlike. It’s as if you are reading with the examiner looking over your shoulder and, thanks to the handout, you already know the ending.
Does any of this sound fun? By focusing a student’s attention on his or her own writing, rather than that of the author they are studying, coursework creates a peculiar academic self-absorption.
It lays out a complex set of tasks designed to make a student sound like a mini-expert in such things as “social, historical and cultural contexts”, robbing them of the suspense and self-forgetfulness of a good story.
Instead, they produce a convincing analysis of an experience they haven’t had. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the Government’s exam watchdog, has said that “the point of coursework is for your son or daughter to work independently”.
A good idea in principle. Some pupils panic in exams, so why not let them show what they can do with more time?
But independent work it is not. It’s just too complicated for teachers to be able to give pupils the freedom to do it on their own; we have to ensure that they cover everything, otherwise we can’t give them good marks.
I wish I could show you my syllabus: list upon list of skills and the percentage of marks that they are worth. For A-level coursework there is a marking chart with 59 bullet points. These micro-measurements have created a vast industry of explanation. There are a lot of muddled and frustrated students out there, and they are not reading Jane Eyre for the answers.
All the confusion stems from a simple fact: you can’t reduce literature to skills. It’s like trying to measure music with string. How did it happen?
Again, the original idea was good: to help pupils by taking the mystery out of marking. When you and I were at school, we had the annoying experience of working very hard on an essay, only to get it back with a low mark and a strange comment.
So it was worth trying to make the marking process more transparent. They just went too far and flattened out the shadows.
They fitted Thornfield with strip lights. The coursework marking scheme is the mad Mrs Rochester of English teaching. At least you can lock it in the attic when your pupils are studying for an exam. At least they then get their noses into the whole book because they don’t know what questions will come up.
By contrast, coursework teaches teenagers to use books, not to love them. And meanwhile the marking scheme yomps about biting chunks out of your lesson. So what can you do as a parent to undo the damage of coursework?
First, encourage your teenager to read the whole text. I know one father who makes outrageous comments about Death of a Salesman to his daughter. She pores over the play to prove him wrong.
Also, recommend other books — but with a light touch. Teenagers spend most of their day being told what to read. Let them see how a book has affected you. One girl kept coming to lessons without her copy of Jane Eyre. “My mum’s reading it and she won’t give it back,” she complained.
“She reads it in her hammock and comes in crying.” That mother has done more good than she can ever know. We can’t all arrange to cry over a book in front of our child, but the mere fact that we love books in general is persuasive.
Teenagers may respond to what you say only rarely; I think that in the long term, they do respond to what you love. To help children to discover what they love, enrol them at the local adult library (a large branch if you can). Libraries help with three things: books that can help with coursework; research skills that will make university easier; and career choices. It may be non-fiction that strikes a chord with them at first.
After all, when the young Jane Eyre curls up with a book behind “folds of scarlet drapery”, she drifts away to “the haunts of sea-fowl” and “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone”.
Last year, a study of pupils’ reading habits was conducted by the National Literacy Trust. One type of fiction high on the list of favourites for both genders and all ages was the ghost story.
The season for these has just begun. The nights are drawing in. It is time to let the shadows return to Thornfield.
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