by Kate Clanchy
In my dreams, I inscribe above all the white boards, in fine italic, on brass, an answer to the second WALT question, which is ‘How Will We Know When We’ve Learned It?’: We will know we are learning to read well when we recognize beauty and truth in our own writing and in others’ writing. We will know we are progressing in writing at those times when we go beyond ourselves; when we express what we did not even know we meant in a graceful synthesis of words and sounds that is both ours alone and part of the richness of our languages and literatures. We will know we have learned much in English at various points in the future, near and far, when we express ourselves confidently in writing, and when we find joy and humour and wisdom in reading. Amen.
In my dreams, we never need to write another WALT. In my dreams, my colleagues are trusted to choose great, rich texts to teach, and we all trust the texts to teach the children. We assess both creative and critical responses to them as their final exams. In my dreams, all kids write poems, and no one is afraid to say this is good or that their poems are good.
And as for Michael Egbe: Mr D taught him piano, Miss A taught him drama, and now he’s at Liverpool Hope. He never did learn literary analysis, but he did start setting his poems to music. And I always thought that ‘Cape’, as it couldn’t help Michael get an A Level, and never won a prize, should at least reach a few more people, and now it has.
Allen’s Smithy
Once upon a time, in England, there existed a respected English course which trusted the teacher to set the texts, which could include creative response, which could be taken by students older than sixteen who didn’t want to do A Level, and which had no exam at the end of it. It was GCSE English Literature, Northern Board; it was available between 1987 and 1998; and it was assessed on a portfolio of coursework. I taught it in Essex, and much preferred it to the A Level that turned so many of my nice, keen, not very academic students into demotivated failures. On the GCSE you could set Essex-friendly texts and take time over them. Very weak kids could progress, and there was any amount of room at the top. In fact, the only problem with this glorious qualification was that most of the sixth-formers who wanted to study English had already passed GCSE, so uptake was low, and mainly consisted of wobbly students also re-taking English Language GCSE, and desperate for support.
Allen, though, had already passed a decent set of GCSEs and was in his second year of Science A Levels. There was nothing wobbly about him, either: a big, capable-looking lad who seemed already too old for school. In fact, with his loping gait and square shoulders and long-sighted gaze, he seemed not particularly suited to inside spaces, either – as if he’d be more comfortable on a hillside, perhaps with a gun dog. His manner was gentle, though, his deep voice carefully quiet, and his intent clear: he was taking this course because he liked literature and meant to get the best from it. Twice a week, he tucked himself manfully behind the desk, outsize shoulders at one end, boots out the other, picked up his books with hands the size of dinner plates, and gave them that distant, appraising stare, as if assessing them for conversion into something else, possibly a table.
I soon learned that he held books at a distance because they spoke so loudly to him. He liked novels, loved plays, and was physically affected by poetry; an image made him flush to his eyebrows, a new idea sent him shuddering back in his seat, feet akimbo. And he wasn’t just open to discussing the sorts of subjects that sparked paranoid silence in most of Essex kids – sexuality, racial identity, love, religion, emotions of all kinds – he was eager to talk about them, leaning over the desk, gesturing with those blacksmith’s hands, long hazel eyes alight with interest. I never met his mother, but I thought he must have a nice one; how else do you learn to be so unafraid of your own, or other people’s feelings?
To have so splendidly masculine a person fully engaged in the feminine project of reading was a huge gift in Essex. The class fell in behind him, and we read all sorts of things, that year, well beyond the syllabus, just because we could: Shakespeare, ee cummings, Lorca, Blake. Ah, Blake. Allen loved Blake. Once, he told me, he started reciting ‘The Tyger’ in Hollywood’s, the largest of all the nightclubs, and his best friend disowned him. But ‘The Tyger’ was his favourite. For his final essay, he wrote, wrestling with the text as if it were wrought iron, six full pages solely on that.
‘What do you reckon it means,’ I asked him, mid-process, ‘“When the stars threw down their spears, / And watered heaven with their tears”?’ I genuinely wanted to know. I haven’t been able to figure it out, myself, I explained to him, that couplet. Is heaven a sort of goldfish bowl around the earth, which the stars are weeping into/on? And if it is, where have the spears gone?
‘No,’ said Allen, surprised at me. ‘Don’t you get it? Honestly? The tears and the spears are the same thing. They’re molten metal, hitting water. Heaven is like, the meniscus.’ Which is a glorious, if deeply eccentric response, a glowing snow globe of vision definitely not allowable at A Level.
I kept Allen’s portfolio (he got an A) in the back of my filing cabinet for twenty-five years, because it was so beautiful in itself, and because it represented me at the very top of my teacherly game too; I had taught him, and that class, as much as I possibly could. When, for the purposes of this book, I pulled it out to see if it was true that it was a brilliant and moving document – it was – and that a quarter of a century previously I really had been allowed to teach so much more freely than I am now – also true – I noticed his distinctive surname and looked him up on Google. The boy with the visions of Blake, it quickly transpired, hadn’t gone to university. He’d gone directly from school as an apprentice into a modern smithy: a precision-engineering firm making parts for the aerospace industry. Twenty-five years later, he owned it and had hugely extended it. Now, he employed fifty people, making him the only managing director and self-made millionaire I’ve ever knowingly read ee cummings with.
And such a useful one, too! I gazed proudly at the LinkedIn page. Not a hedge-fund manager, not an estate agent, but a manufacturer of actual objects, one of the last in England, and in charge of a factory which trained its employees carefully and held on to them for a long time. The Tory Party’s ideal human. Ha, I thought, chew on that, Michael Gove!
Unless, of course, poetry was nothing to do with it. Perhaps Allen didn’t remember William Blake at all, just the skills gained in the class. Perhaps he did not remember me, either, because even though he had spent two hours a week for a year sharing his imaginative visions of poetry with me, which is a very intimate thing to do, we had also had a very decorous, respectful teacher–pupil relationship. I couldn’t recall a single piece of personal information we’d ever shared.
It took me a year to message him on LinkedIn, and ask. His response was immediate, passionate, and nothing about skills: of course he remembered me. ‘When we read books with you the world opened up,’ he wrote. ‘Your lessons were where I learned who I was, became conscious of myself, grew up. That time was so important to me, a free space.’
An emotional education: that is something else English teachers have always delivered. English: the lesson where you laugh about sex, and argue about war, and talk about jealousy. English: where you grow up. Growing up does not WALT well, any more than creativity does, and in the last decade, English teachers do. Growing up does not WALT well, but, like creativity, it happens when you read. When I looked back through Allen’s folder again, I could see it happening to him. We’d read Farrukh Dhondy, Willy Russell, Jeanette Winterson before we settled on the poetry fiesta, and Allen had taken each text, crammed with its rich, subversive information, seriously and gently into his big hands and large mind. They had not made him into a poet or a writer, but the thoughtful, liberal man at the end of the portfolio had a wider emotional experience than the sweet boy at the beginning of it, as well as better information and a few more writing skills. Allen had taught me something too, about humility, and not looking at footballing, laddish, working-class boys with a dismissiv
e eye. Some of them recite Blake in nightclubs.
It is tempting, here, to reduce this to function, too, and say that Allen’s improved empathy made him a better manager of people. Allen himself takes a wider view. ‘Your classroom was a space for my imagination to roam freely, with you just whistling me in when I needed it,’ he wrote, confirming that there was indeed a hillside inside his head, and also that English is an ineffably useful subject, and should be available, preferably in the free, flexible way I was able to teach it to Allen, to everyone. And next time I address a gathering of anxious young English teachers I will be able to say that, and that everyone is entitled to poetry, and that reading it makes you grow up, emotionally and intellectually; the managing director says so.
About Being Out of Place
Sofia, Janie, and Chris
Sofia’s Spelling
Sofia is writing in the library, tucked in the quiet corner that is ours on a Tuesday. Sofia is fourteen, but she looks younger. She has a soft round face, soft curly hair, and big glasses over wide, guileless, green eyes. The hand moving across the paper is plump, and the writing it leaves behind is noticeably childlike, full of pot hooks and strange capitals. The spelling, if you look closely, is childlike too, with homophones confused and random extra vowels. But this is what the words say:
When Death comes
(After Mary Oliver)
and lifts
its tarred head like a crow.
When it kisses my cheek like
an aunt, mild
as a childhood disease,
when Death comes and haunts
the tree outside
and strokes my window
like a lover,
when it comes like
an office meeting, a presentation,
a side door
that you never noticed,
opening –
‘Golly,’ I say, as I read it, slowly, partly because of the spelling, partly because this is strong and surprising stuff, even for Sofia. ‘Did you think of that just now?’
‘No,’ says Sofia. ‘I had that idea in the week. I stored it in my head, you know? I hoped it would come out in Poetry. Oh, I’ve just thought of something.’ And she resumes writing.
Sofia is one of my top poets. She’s won three national awards in the last year. She is also dyslexic. So dyslexic that she could not read independently till she was ten; that she has a full statement of special needs, special computer programmes, extra lessons, an individual timetable; so dyslexic that much of school has been a torture to her, and so, even though she loves words and stories, is the library.
And please don’t tell me that books
are a trapdoor to another world
because that door
never opened for me.
As she wrote last year.
When I trained to be a teacher, I was taught nothing formal about dyslexia; it came under Special Educational Needs (SEN), which I was not doing. As I went into classrooms, I had a bit of in service training that told me that children who couldn’t spell, but seemed otherwise bright, and who reversed letters, such as ‘b’ and ‘d’, might be dyslexic, and should be referred to SEN. Later, there was an enthusiasm for yellow films laid over text, and yellow glasses, to help dyslexic students read, and more students were given extra time in exams. In my sixth-form college, I scribed for a couple in exams, and marvelled at the disjunction between their previous grades and the fluent paragraphs coming out of their mouths. Gradually, as I learned more, and the world learned more, I started to think of dyslexia as very widespread and very wide, a constellation of features which started with:
Difficulty with spelling
Slow reading
Clumsiness
Bad handwriting
Constantly lost
Terrible maths
Can’t read the time.
Then widened to include some associated syndromes:
Dyspraxia: clumsy movement, difficulty with catching and gripping
Dyscalculia: difficulty with reading numbers
Dysgraphia: difficulty with handwriting
Something unusual about the way the right and left hemispheres of the brain connect
An inherited condition – runs in families.
And then expanded again to include some more subtle symptoms, such as:
Very competent reading and writing combined with the inability to read one’s own writing back
Usually competent spelling accompanied by wildly inaccurate rendering of longer words, especially those with multiple vowels, as if the words had been learned by outline only
Rapid reading combined with the difficulties above
Inability to do a crossword or play Scrabble – as if letters could not be a system, as if words could never be detached from meaning
Terrible mental arithmetic scores combined with a talent for algebra
Tendency to become overwhelmed if required to remember more than one task at a time.
And then:
A lifetime of anxiety attacks about handwriting, reading aloud, finding a direction, reading a map, the clock, and a calendar.
And finally:
Ability to visualize 3D space – for example, to pack the boot of a car, see where a large wardrobe would fit in a room, or lay out a poem
To play chess and draughts
To be an architect; disproportionately, they are dyslexic
To sculpt, to scrimshander a carrot, to make a flower from a radish, a statuette from corrugated cardboard
To join up ideas and images, to see one thing on top of another
To draw
Enhanced ability to listen to words, especially sounds And to make a poetic image
And perhaps to be a poet.
To be dyslexic, says my friend Sally Davis, who teaches a famous workshop about the experience, is to have a mind like an old-fashioned champagne coupe: a very wide cup of perception supported by a narrow, fragile pipe of processing capacity.
Sometimes, a dyslexic person may become overwhelmed by how much she takes in: for example, looking at a page of writing when the white spaces shout as loudly to her as the black letters; reading a map when every mark seems equally important. She can’t force all those perceptions down the processing capacity; stuff gets jammed. In compensation, on the way down, thing often adheres to thing in unusual ways, making witchy intuitions, surreal truths, and poetic images.
I have a mind like that: a champagne coupe of perception, a narrow stem of processing. I don’t know when I noticed this, exactly – when I started to identify features of the dyslexic spectrum as belonging to me, or to say: ‘I’m a bit dyslexic, too’ when I met dyslexic children – but I think when I was about thirty-five. I would say now that while I certainly never went through Sofia’s pain, most dyslexic features here are also mine. I have a powerful visual memory that allowed me to ‘photograph’ words as a child and so appear to learn to read well. But I can only spell with a spell checker; can only make my way around a town with satnav or iPhone; only know right from left if I pretend, briefly, to hold a pen; can only write down a phone number left on an answering machine if I replay the message nine times, one for each number; have never dared learn to drive because all roads are a fog to me; only started to write when word-processing was invented; would never have finished a book without it. As for when I started to excuse myself some of my chronic anxiety about these difficulties, or when I learned to start avoiding the sorts of circumstances which cause it: I haven’t, yet.
But I am working on the positives. When I met Sofia, I was able to say: ‘If you’re dyslexic, you may well be a poet too.’ And to tell her that most of the poets I knew had no sense of direction and were chronically muddled; that only one or two of them could drive; that they were disproportionately left-handed; that Benjamin Zephaniah was nearly as dyslexic as she was and wrote about it. And now, whatever tortures she endures, she has, as she says, her diagnosis, both as a dyslexic and a poet.
&nbs
p; When Sofia was twelve, she wrote a vivid poem called ‘Resolution’, which began:
I shall take off my dyslexic coat
And run away in my poetry dress,
But last week, she wrote this, a poem where she is still the outsider, still cut off from books and the things which help, but where she is also potent, mysterious, full of brains and hurt: surely, a poem about dyslexia, and how it is not, after all, something to be taken off, but rather part of her essence and her gift.
Learning Difficulty
Times I felt like a blackberry bush, sitting
in the corner hiding blue brains
darker than bruises. Times I taught myself
to be content with being alone, myself
my own crutch. Times spent smelling
pink and blue words. I remember talking
to the dark. I don’t remember the bookshelves
any more, but I feel the crates
of ordered pages standing upright like soldiers.
In the place I wasn’t allowed to go were the things
I really needed, the slug pellets to keep
albatrosses away from the primroses. I’m recalling
me pushing my hair back with my glasses
that sat on my head like a robin, us
both out of place.
Chris and Janie’s Code
Janie and Chris are eleven and have Autism Spectrum Disorder. They know this: they are fully certified and statemented; they will tell you all about it freely. They are cheerful, frank children in general: shouty, active, unselfconsciously odd. When we fill in the form for a poetry competition, they both seek out and tick ‘other’ for their gender. This seems spot on; though they both wear skirts and have long, thick hair, it is somehow very hard to identify them as girls. There are too many things they are not doing, indefinable ways of walking and sitting and talking they are not mimicking: codes that neurotypical eleven-year-old girls must simply pick up, and that neurotypical I must somehow expect. When, still filling in the form, they flick through the lists of ‘country of origin’, I feel there should be an ‘other’ for that too: ASD Land.