The 2012/13 Orwell Sessions have been running for about a month. So far we have;
The Orwell Sessions – 8:00 in the Morning! Why?
One of the problems of preparing for GCSE is that almost every piece of work you do seems to be preparing or a specific exam or assessment. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this – you study a topic, you write about it, you do an assessment, you move on – that’s life. – However, when there is pressure to get to grips with a new topic and then write an essay of sufficient quality to get a good grade, most people will opt for a stopgap coping strategy of writing in the same way as they have alwasy written and will probably never get to grips with how they write.
With the time pressures in every student’s life – Controlled Assessments and exams in a variety of subjects, supported by intervention sessions and revision sessions all based on how to approach a specific style of question to get the best mark – there is rarely an opportunity to break down, examine and improve a student’s writing style. Students at 16 can still be producing a version of the style of writing they developed in Yr 5 or 6 and this affects confidence, enjoyment and grades.
Furthermore endless focus on GCSE topics solely because they are GCSE topics can be boring in the extreme to both students and teachers. Once you get really bored with something, your ability to write effectively and enthusiastically is lessened and your opinion of English Literature as a worthwhile subject inevitably goes down.
Developing your writing is a life long skill which you can always hone and refine. I was very fortunate to have three teachers take considerable time and effort to read my work, comment on certain aspects of it approvingly, and then then it apart and utterly re-build it. Two of these teachers were at school; one when I was 13 (Mr Eastgate – an ICT teacher moonlighting as an English teacher), one when I was 16 (Mrs Franklin, the Head of English). The other was a history professor (Marc Selverstone) who ruthlessly but very pleasantly ripped apart my essays on the Great Depression.
Like mechanics in a garage looking up at a car with a faulty engine, all three of them pointed out to me that my uneven writing style was preventing me from getting the most out of my ideas. It was Ok, it would do, but it wasn’t what it should have been, which was a shame because it was preventing me from reaching my potential. Each one at different stages of my education showed me what was missing from my style and how that was preventing me from saying clearly and effectively what was locked inside my head. They looked up from their mechanic’s pit, took the engine apart, cleaned it up and rebuilt it with new parts. Then they showed me what had gone wrong and told me to be more careful in future. Most importantly they gave me the new mechanical expertise to fix it myself whenever it broke down and i am grateful to all three of them now.
By working in classes entirely separate from the everyday GCSE work I want to help you look at your own writing and make it clearer, punchier, more efficient and effective. I want to give you the insight to criticise your own work, give you new writing skills and challenge you to make your won writing better. To do this, I propose we use as a model probably the greatest prose stylist of the Twentieth Century. He wrote exactly the the sort of organised and readable writing that we should all be aiming for.
In separate additional classes before school starts we’ll spend 40 minutes looking at his writing to find out what exactly it is that makes his writing so good. Then we’ll write and re-write our own paragraphs replicating Orwell’s careful, steady style and using his techniques.
It won’t be fun in the way that a day at the beach or an afternoon at the football is fun, but it will be interesting and you will find it useful. Also, working together on this stuff should be an enjoyable experience and my writing is as fair game for criticism as yours. If you really put the effort in and do some reading and some practice in your own time you’ll notice the benefits and become a much more confident student of English. It should also lift a weight from your shoulders in that you won’t have to worry about how you are going to write anymore – you’ll know how to do it and instead be able to concentrate on saying interesting and intelligent things to answer the questions and impress the examiner.
You’ll go into that exam in May looking forward to it like a boxer approaching the ring after months of training thinking “Come on! Lets have yer! I can take all of yer!”
Tuesday, Thursday 8:00 AM start. Bring your own cup of coffee to wake you up.
andrewstephenjones 