English Meet 2025: report
Last night we had the fourth English Meet on a lovely spring evening, with sunshine flooding the garden beside Whispering House at St Columba’s.
As with the three previous Meets (there is a summary of the subjects covered on slide 2 of the presentation, below) we had a series of teachers presenting on topics of their own choice - listening to these enthusiasms is always most uplifting.
At the bottom of this post the full presentation can be seen, and downloaded as a PDF.
1. Holly McIndoe spoke on ‘Teaching Metaphor’, and gave an absorbing and thoughtful account of the deeper structures of metaphor, a concept which too often is not fully understood by children (understandably, particularly in First Year). The definition they arrive at is often not particularly helpful. She also addressed how she teaches the concept.
2. Selena Wilkes presented on ‘Introducing Shakespeare: the language of love and hate’, showing how she uses insults and indeed compliments to have fun with language and show her students how vibrant and modern it truly is (a theme taken up by Dan Stynes later). This is a particularly fruitful approach for exploring the nuances of Shakespeare’s characterisation, and his plays as ‘living’.
3. Maggie Whelan looked at deliberate practice through using Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s book The Writing Revolution, especially in terms of explicit instruction and the sentence as the building block of all writing. She gave examples such as ‘because/but/so’ sentences (see the slides), and how strategies can enable children to improve and to express themselves in a more sophisticated manner: their confidence can be improved.
4. Dan Stynes was prompted by Katherine Rundell’s book Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne (my book of 2022) to show how he helps ‘make John Donne modern’ for the boys he teaches. Most of his focus was on ‘The Flea’, which he read out memorably. He showed how contemporary it can be for the social media and ‘Adolescence’ generation of boys. He also briefly covered five other poems he uses for the Leaving Certificate.
5. Amy Earley’s talk was on ‘Taking film studies from the screen to the page’ (and then back to the screen at the end of the process). She showed how she does this in a unit of learning for her Second Year. She aligns this with Junior Cycle Learning Outcomes. A good amount of time is spent watching trailers and then shorts, and in the end groups produce a short film themselves, an example of which she showed in the Meet to much appreciation and amusement.
6. Finally I spoke on how antithetical AI is to our practice as English teachers. It can have a place behind the scenes to aid teachers, but it should have no place in the classroom itself: there is a single slide summarising how different AI and English are. I recommended some good thinkers on AI and English, and quoted from John Warner’s new book More Than Words: how to think about writing in the age of AI. There were many lively contributions afterwards from teachers who share deep concerns about how damaging this technology could be to pupils’ learning.
Many thanks to all who spoke, and who attended. It’s a winning formula!
PDF download (without transitions)