Hilary Wilce explains the importance of teaching pupils to be brave, resilient and kind.
4
In the paragraph below, is the writer talking about
‘Backbone’ (her own book) or ‘How Children Succeed’ (Paul Tough’s book)? How do you know?
On the way, it looks at the research showing how children are becoming more self-absorbed and less able to deal with setbacks, and outlines how this in turn is making them less equipped to work with others and bounce back from disappointments. All this sprang out of the growing unease I felt as I spent time in schools. As a journalist, I was usually there to write about ‘development’ in education – a revamped curriculum, or inventive method of teaching – yet it seemed to me that pupils’ attitudes were too often sabotaging the very things designed to help them. And not, alas, in any exhilaratingly rebellious way.
5
Who might ‘one’ and ‘another’ be referring to in the paragraph below? How do you know?
One said each new intake of students seemed less willing to share or even hang their own coats on their own pegs. Another complained about the staggering sense of entitlement many pupils now demonstrated – if he gave them poor marks for a piece of work, they felt it was never because they could have done better, but only because he was
‘picking on’ them. (And often, he said, their parents agreed.) 6
What do you understand by the phrases ‘tomorrow’s adults’
and ‘to draw on personal resources’ in the paragraph below?
(These are likely to be referred to in some way in the missing paragraph above.)
All this matters desperately because in a competitive world, tomorrow’s adults will have to draw deeply on their personal resources to navigate life’s constant changes. A good life demands courage, resilience, honesty and kindness. This is the true spine of success, without which we are all jellyfish.
And since no-one wants their child to be a jellyfish, our prime job as parents – and teachers – has to be to help our children build the backbone they need.
65 READY FOR READING
Reading and Use of English
1–2 Start by asking students a few simple questions like: What do you have to do with the paragraphs that have been removed from the text? (Decide which one fits in each gap.) Should you read the text first or the missing paragraphs? (The text.) Students read through the What to expect in the exam box. Then
put students in pairs and have them discuss the title and make predictions. Note that this SPEAK task illustrates a good exam strategy: using the title or pictures to make predictions. Then students read the text quickly to check their predictions. Set a short time limit. Ask the class if any of their ideas were mentioned.
TB65
E
G
C
F
A
D
B not used
3 Read the article again. For each gap, carefully read the paragraphs on either side, together with the questions in italics. Look for pronouns, synonyms or paraphrases that may refer back or forwards to objects, people, events or ideas mentioned in the previous or next paragraph.
4 Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A–G the one which fits each gap (1–6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
A Rather, children seemed distracted, or else worryingly devoted to getting things
‘right’. And when I started to ask teachers about this, I released a tsunami of anxiety about the everyday behaviour they were seeing in school.
B Reaction to both these publications was diverse, and it wasn’t just parents who responded. And while they had much in common, there was one aspect of his research that seemed dubious to me.
C But when I got over myself and settled down to read his work, I realised we were approaching the same important territory from different angles. His is a brilliantly readable account of the growing evidence that inner resources count more than any amount of extra teaching when it comes to overcoming educational disadvantage.
D Meanwhile, universities were raising the alarm about how today’s ‘satnav’ students seemed less able to think for themselves. A toxic combination of teaching to the test at school and parents hovering over their lives was starting to mean that even those headed for the most prestigious universities were helpless when they first had to fend for themselves.
E This is the message of a new education book that has been topping the best-seller charts in the US. It has caused great debate by pointing out that over-attentive parenting is associated with rising rates of anxiety and failure among the young generation.
F My book, by contrast, is being written specifically for parents to show what strength of character consists of. It identifies six key values that, when knitted together, give a person deep-rooted focus, integrity and resilience, and suggests an outline for encouraging children to grow the ‘backbone’ of these qualities.
G But, as this book shows, character is badly in need of a comeback, and some pioneering schools are already starting to put it at the heart of their curriculum. It’s a timely message, yet last summer, when the book was first published, it had me grinding my teeth in fury.
How to go about it Part 7 tests your understanding of text structure. Therefore, it is important to carefully read through the gapped text to get a sense of how ideas or an argument is developed.
66
READY FOR READING
3 Students could do this close reading exercise individually or in pairs. Note that training students to notice this type of language is one way you can significantly improve your students’ performance on this task.
4 Direct students to the How to go about it box.
Remind them that there is one extra paragraph that doesn’t fit anywhere, though it will be carefully written
to seem as if it should fit somewhere in the text. When you check answers as a class, after the students have completed the task individually, it would be helpful to display the text using a smartboard or projector if this option is available to you. This will make it easy to point to specific pronouns or other words that were important for determining the correct match.
TB66
Reading and Use of English Part 8 Multiple matching
What to expect in the exam
• Part 8 consists of a set of questions for which you have to find the relevant information in one of several short texts, or in one of the sections of a long text.
• The task requires you to scan the text in order to find the specific information you need. It is not necessary to read every word in the text to complete the task.
1 Read through The art of biography on page 68 to get a general idea of its content.
What is the writer’s attitude to biography at the beginning of the text? And by the end?
2 Read the article again. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections (A–D). The sections may be chosen more than once.
How to go about it
• Underline key words in the statements before you read the text(s). One of these has been done for you.
• Scan each text, looking for information which matches that contained in the statements.
The first statement for text A is Question 2 and the key words are underlined, and the relevant section in the text has been underlined. For the other statements, underline and label the relevant section, as in the example for Question 2.
• If there are any statements you have not matched, scan the texts again looking for the information you need.
In which section are the following mentioned?
a biography being based around items that would have been meaningful
to the book’s subject 1
Hughes’ confession that she was once reluctant to reveal the nature of her job 2 Hughes’ admission that she had been wrong about the state of biography
as a genre 3
the possible reaction of readers today towards biographies they consider
oversize 4
the advantage of skimming over less interesting parts of a subject’s life 5 the view that the traditional structure of a biography does not accurately
reflect reality 6
the skill required to produce a biographical-type book that features
multiple subjects 7
the stimulus a biographer’s subject required before finding their true vocation 8 a specific event being used as the focal point in a biography that deals with
wider issues 9
Hughes’ contempt for a trend she thought she had detected 10
67 READY FOR READING
Reading and Use of English
1 Focus students on the What to expect in the exam box. Elicit the difference between skimming (reading for the general idea) and scanning (reading for specific information). Students discuss the questions after quickly reading the text once. Alternatively, students could read the questions first before reading the texts, which is an effective exam strategy for this task.
2 Discuss the strategies in the How to go about it box.
Examine the underlined words in question 2 and text A. Elicit why A is the correct answer. Note the use of paraphrase, e.g. confession and admitting that.
Remind students of the importance of underlining relevant parts of the text. Set a time limit of no more than 15 minutes. During feedback, display the text on page 68 if possible.
TB67
1
At the beginning, the writer says that the genre of biography is in ‘a very poor condition’. She implies that modern biographies are only concerned with facts and are not well written. By the end of the article, she has changed her mind and says that ‘more and more interesting books are being published which deal with the lives of others’. She suggests that they are not always marketed as
‘biographies’ but they are still biographical.
C A B D D B C D C A
3 In Part 8, nouns or noun phrases may appear in questions 1–10, such as the writer’s confession that or the view that in the reading task above. Adjectives might also be used to indicate opinion or attitude. Go to the Additional materials on page 204 and do the exercise.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece in which I declared that biography, if not quite dead, was in very poor condition. I was concerned that for far too long, publishers had been churning out inferior versions of Amanda Foreman’s excellent Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which had deservedly been a hit. The endless imitation Georgianas, however, showed all the tendencies that the critic Janet Malcolm has identified as the mark of so much biographical writing: a sense that, as long as the facts are there, it doesn’t matter how badly or baldly they are set out. The biographies Malcolm had in her sights were written in leaden prose and entailed a marathon trudge from cradle to grave. I hesitated before telling people I was a biographer: it felt tantamount to admitting that I was a journalist incapable of original thought. (2)
But it turns out that biography wasn’t in terminal decline after all. It was more that I hadn’t been looking for it hard enough or in quite the right places.
Last weekend, the University of East Anglia hosted a conference at which the masters of biography took its pulse and made the cheering diagnosis that it is, in fact, in good health. What has happened, these expert practitioners explained, is that biography has changed its shape. This shift has emerged from a growing sense that biography as it used to be done was not getting us close to the experience it was trying to describe. We all know that life isn’t actually comprised of a stately march through the decades in which loose ends, false trails and those periods where nothing much happens are tidied away out of sight. Mostly our lives feel shapeless, coming into focus only when a particular occasion makes us feel, for a few minutes at least, fully ourselves.
One new approach to biography employs the presenting of something small to tell a bigger story. Frances Wilson demonstrated how effective this can be in How to Survive the Titanic. She focuses on the moment when J Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner, jumped into a lifeboat while other first- class men allowed women and children to take the available spaces. Pressing hard on Ismay’s split-second decision to leap to safety, Wilson tells a story not just about one man’s lost honour, but about a layered drama of class, nationality and technological modernity. Another approach is to organise your narrative around objects that carried a particular emotional charge for the person you are writing about. In The Real Jane Austen, for instance, biographer Paula Byrne pulls out an East Indian shawl and a carriage that figured in both Austen’s personal experience and her fiction, and weaves a new narrative around them. Amanda Foreman uses yet another approach in her latest book. In A World on Fire, she tells the story of the American Civil War by using scores of micro- biographies. Dealing with all these characters demonstrates her extraordinary degree of technical ability. While in a classic single-subject biography it’s clear where you need to go next, in group biography you are required, like a circus performer, to keep many plates spinning while making it all look effortless.
Other biographers have realised that their subject’s non-eventful schooling or the long holidays by the sea can be compressed into a few terse paragraphs so they can spend more time on the bits that matter. It is an approach showcased brilliantly by Matthew Hollis. In Now All Roads Lead to France, Hollis concentrates on the defining moment when the Anglo-Welsh writer Edward Thomas gave up his unfulfilling journalistic career in favour of the poetry he had never quite got round to making. Under the pressure of the looming war, Thomas finally became the kind of writer he was meant to be, producing poetry that would change the music of the English language forever. It would be disingenuous to claim that these new ways of telling lives are entirely driven by intellectual concerns. The pressures are commercial, too. People also have shorter attention spans, which means that those doorstop biographies of 400 pages can start to seem like a looming threat rather than a delicious promise. But more and more interesting books are being published which deal with the lives of others. They may not announce themselves as ‘biographies’, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t.