The first poem in Roger Robinson’s book is ‘The Missing’, dedicated to ‘the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster’, and the last poem is ‘A Portable Paradise’ itself. In between hell and paradise there are poems of tremendous thematic and formal variety. It is a book I’ll keep returning to.
Read MoreSpring is the third in Ali Smith’s seasons quartet. It will be interesting to see what these books, written out of the heat of immediate events in British culture, will look like in 20 years' time. Without that perspective, all we can say for the moment is that they are unique responses to the world today: complex, agile, rangy, funny, surprising and intellectually dazzling.
Read MoreOne of the deepest pleasures in life: being a child snuggled up to a parent, listening to a story. And also being a parent holding your child, telling that story (such as, for instance, Sam McBratney’s gentle series Guess How Much I Love You ). It is simply The ineffable magic in the mingling of a voice, a narrative, loving attention, and physical closeness.
Read MoreReader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world (2018) is an elegant and insightful analysis of how deep reading is under threat, and of how this particular form of attention is being eroded by the digital universe in which we now live. For an English teacher, the book is essential reading. For me, it is one of the most important books of our recent years.
Read MoreThis is the preface to a series of short essays about ‘Attention’ in our world, including our schools. To start off: a still life of asparagus spears, by the artist Adriaen Coorte, from 1697.
Read MoreShakespeare’s four great tragedies all open in uncertainty and discomfort. In Macbeth, three ‘weird’ figures of indeterminate gender speak in riddles. In Othello, two men mutter obscurely in a Venetian street, one telling the other of his contempt for his own boss, and then the two rouse the house of a respected Senator. In King Lear, two noblemen discuss with dismay how the aged King is favouring one Duke over another, following which the said King, appallingly, slices up his own kingdom.
Read MoreWe are in a golden age of writing about teaching, much of which (though not all) has been prompted by online connections and blogs. Here is a small selection of books aimed at English teaching, or which will be of interest to English teachers. It will be added to gradually.
Adam Low's documentary on Séamus Heaney for Arena went out on the BBC recently, and before Christmas at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin it received a big-screen showing to a packed audience, including many members of the poet's family. Afterwards (pictured above) Professor Margaret Kelleher, Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature & Drama at UCD and Chair of the board of the IFI, led a discussion with Marie and Catherine Heaney, as well as Adam Low.
Read MoreThis is my selection of new books I read last year, published for the first time in either hardback or paperback.
Book of the Year
Robert Macfarlane: Underland: a Deep Time Journey. Macfarlane is simply one of the best writers working today, and this immense achievement shows again how close he is to the most important issue of our time.
I gave the keynote presentation at the Irish National Organisation of Teachers of English annual conference in October 2019 in Portlaoise. It’s below (I hope plenty of it doesn’t make sense, since it depends on the commentary).
‘The Building Blocks of the English Classroom’ looked at vocabulary, how cognitive science can assist us, ways of increasing reading, and how modelling can help.
A new venture for Thursday 23rd April 2020 (Shakespeare's birthday): an evening dedicated to sharing ideas about teaching Leaving Certificate English.
Venue: Whispering House at our school, www.stcolumbas.ie (which was the venue on October 5th for the first-ever Irish researchED) in South Dublin. 7.00pm to 9.00pm. It will be free to attend, but will be ticketed (ticketing via EventBrite later down the line). See the venue here.
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