Who are EWE looking at…..

Hawklad had an English assessment to do at home today.

Compare how poets present attitudes towards a parent in ‘Follower’ and one other poem from the ‘Love and Relationship’ anthology.

One poem was provided the other poem had to be recalled from memory, the class has been trying to memorise quotes from the other poems. 45 minutes to answer this one…..

Hawklad was suitably impressed…..

“Dad that was 44 minutes too long to answer that….”

“Dad don’t you think the poets would have hoped people would read all of their poems, rather than just trying to memorise little bits of their work like parrots”

“If I’m going to memorise some prose, then it’s going to be Shakespeare”

“I’m as bad at poetry as you are Dad….”

He did his best and that all that counts.

I was suitably not impressed with the question as well. I just wish schools and exam boards just thought a bit more about the questions they are setting. A question about parents and poetry seems relatively innocuous but of the thousands of pupils answering it, how many have lost a parent. One of the poems the class had to examine stresses the importance of a mother to a child. How’s that going to make kids like Hawklad feel. How many don’t have a parents at all. How many haven’t seen a parent in years. How many are going through hell because of their parents. This question could be really distressing for some pupils. Surely that’s not fair, surely that’s not right.

39 thoughts on “Poems”

  1. Sometimes the generic approach ends up leaving some students left out or unfortunately triggered as well. Good for Hawklad for his thought reflection to you!

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    1. Who are these teachers? Kids themselves? Trained to not think things through or trained to do what they’re told and tell kids to do what they’re told? Nope, you’re right Sadje, they haven’t thought through this one, whoever it was that set it.

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  5. Oofff… inconsiderate lesson plans!!

    Some “booty rape” (???) tiktok is making the rounds of the elementary school across the street and resulted in a teacher asking my 10yr old female neighborkid, without a parent present, if she had booty-raped another kid. I don’t know if the intent was to ask if she had shared the vid but the Q was completely inappropriate and wrecked the kid.

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      1. Creativity will be dangerous to them…. And mena they’d have to get off their backsides and actually access something as opposed to checking how many boxes it ticked.

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  7. I hope you sent an email to the teacher who set this task for their students.
    This is a true story. A woman I knew asked her daughter why she came home early from school crying? The daughter said, “Because I’m going to Hell!” The woman asked who told her that, and she replied her teacher.
    My friend bolted straight to the school and burst into her classroom, and reamed her teacher out for scaring her daughter and then sending her home alone. The teacher tried to tell her that she, my friend, was responsible because she never taught her daughter about God or religion, “And you’re going to Hell too!” When the principal came into the room and heard what was going on, he fired the teacher on the spot, and apologised for what the teacher did!
    But no apology helped the frightened girl. The teacher had made such a negative impression on her she ended up in therapy for six months.
    No one knows what happened to the teacher, but hopefully she never ended up in another public school classroom.
    That is how dangerous not-thinking-things-through can be.

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    1. Sadly I bet she did. We once had a teacher who thought autism was something you grow out of…… Another one who thought it would a good idea to get a 9 year old to stand in front of the school and tell them all about what it was like to have autism…….

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      1. Yeah, people who have never experienced a person with autism, or what we call developmental disabilities, can be very stupid around people with such difficulties as compared to “normal” people (but in my entire lifetime I have never met a truly normal person, they just think they are!). And then you throw in religion, politics, genders, sexual orientations, and a whole list of other things, and people don’t think at all. They just speak up, or speak out, not knowing they are probably going to hurt someone, or piss someone off.
        We humans have a long way to go to learn to be humane. We may never get there.

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  11. It’s not right at all and demonstrates how out of touch the education system is. Pathetic. I agree with Hawklad about memorizing bits rather than reading all and also yes, Shakespeare is worth remembering!

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  12. “Dad don’t you think the poets would have hoped people would read all of their poems, rather than just trying to memorise little bits of their work like parrots”
    The best answer to be given!
    And yes, it is thoughtless again.

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  13. It’s hard not being able to protect our kids. But then life is hard. Maybe it could be your opportunity to help him process some hard stuff? I remember my kids opening up with painful feelings when the school had father daughter dances or father son camping and theirs was not there. I believe it helped with their healing. We cannot avoid pain. We can teach them to cope though. And for that, we have to acknowledge it.

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  14. Pingback: Poems – The Scorpion

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