For years you kept your accentin a box beneath the bed Liz Berry Summary Homing was written in 2014 as part of Berry’s award-winning poetry collection The Black Country. The collection is an ode to her birthplace and family heritage … Continue reading Homing by Liz Berry: AQA Worlds and Lives
the Punjabi in my mouth, became dislodged as milk teeth fell Raman Mundair Summary The speaker begins with comparing themselves and their sense of isolation to the Hindu deity Rama. They go on to lament their loneliness by highlighting their … Continue reading Name Journeys: AQA Worlds and Lives
Hello, she said, and startled me.Nice day. Nice day I agreed. James Berry Summary On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955 was written by James Berry, who was born in 1924 and died in 2017. Born in Jamaica … Continue reading On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955: AQA Worlds and Lives
Travel back in time with George Eliot’s In a London Drawingroom, a poem that remained unpublished for 90 years. The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. George Eliot Summary The poem describes the speaker’s view from their drawingroom, which … Continue reading In a London Drawingroom Analysis: AQA Worlds and Lives
To see a world in a grain of sand and KS3 National Poetry Day resources in an hour. English teachers rejoice: National Poetry Day 2020 is nigh! Continue reading National Poetry Day 2020 with Beyond
As I get older, I am starting to embrace some facets of middle age: comfortable shoes, sensible bedtimes, a strange fondness for Philip Schofield. The things I looked on as sad, or clichéd, as a chipper young twenty-year-old, now have … Continue reading Lesson Planning: It’s an Oldie but a Goodie!
We’ve written before about impostor syndrome, that nagging sense that the certificates you hold and the years of experience under your belt still don’t qualify you to do your job. Well, we’re going to take that one step further now … Continue reading Do Your Students Make You Feel Second-Rate?
Students need role models; they need someone to aspire to, to look up to, to make them think I could do that. Despite great strides in sexual equality, all too often these role models are male – after all, women … Continue reading Five Inspirational Women We Should Be Talking About To Students
Though secondary school teachers are of course experts in their chosen fields, it’s probably fair to state that most of us have an Achilles heel. Mine is poetry. Fellow English teachers extol the emotional connection that they had with a poem, while the emotional connection I typically experience is deep confusion. The Cox Report (1989), which helped to establish the national curriculum as we know it, brilliantly described poetry as ‘language made strange’, though chances are its author foresaw the students finding it alien rather than those charged with teaching it. Remarkably, the poetry essays I wrote at university all … Continue reading What’s Your Achilles’ Heel?
Beyond explores My Last Duchess poem by Robert Browning, helping GCSE students with the Power and Conflict module for AQA English Literature Paper 2. Continue reading Revise My Last Duchess by Robert Browning: Power and Conflict Poems
