John Bald/language and literacy

The Disappearance of Emile Zola. Michael Rosen.

Michael Rosen’s interest in French, and in Emile Zola, came as a surprise, though not quite such a surprise as that of his late father, Professor Harold Rosen, who would pore over his homework in his eighties much as I did myself as a teenager. By the time I started to read French at university, Zola was considered so last century that a friendly lecturer (with a doctorate in seventeenth century drama) asked me why the hell I was bothering to read him. My reply that it was a good book seemed inadequate, but I still think this is the main reason for reading and studying literature. Zola was, and is, an important writer, and Michael Rosen’s book reminds us of one of the reasons for this.

“J’accuse,” is one of the most quoted lines in French history. It was the headline of Zola’s verbal onslaught on the establishment that fabricated evidence against Captain Alfred Dreyfus for allegedly leaking to the Germans details of the recoil mechanism of France’s 75mm quick-firing field gun, which was to play a crucial role in World War I. The false accusation was followed by a cover-up, and then by persecution of those who sought to expose the cover-up, including Zola himself, who was convicted of libel for telling the truth. Unlike Oscar Wilde, he had the sense to choose exile rather than imprisonment, and this book tells the story of his exile.

I learned a lot from it. I had not known that Zola’s first publisher in English, Henry Vizetelly, had been fined, and then imprisoned – like Wilde, with hard labour – on charges of publishing obscenity brought by the “National Vigilance Association.”  I found it mildly surprising that Zola himself was allowed to live in hotels in London and Upper Norwood, and later to take leases on houses, with virtually no security arrangements. Opponents of Dreyfus and Zola were determined to maintain the former’s conviction even after it had been proved that he was innocent and a Major Esterhazy, who admitted forging the evidence, was guilty. Dreyfus was Jewish, and, as one of his enemies put it, all Jews were traitors. This, even more than the outrageous injustice to Dreyfus, was Zola’s driving force – the full power of the French state was being used to enforce lies and suppress the truth.

There is much social history alongside the drama. Zola cannot abide British food. The idea of putting water on a steak offends his soul. He is a pushy parent, urging and bribing his children to be top of the class, and telling his son that if he is lazy and tells lies, he will turn into a monkey and be put in the zoo. Zola is a keen photographer, with his own darkrooms, and pedals around with a plate camera on his bicycle. His double life, with children by his mistress while enjoying the support of his wife, are described in extracts from letters, as is their reconciliation – Zola’s wife has a picture of his mistress placed in his coffin. The enmity behind the story is never far away, though, and a confession that an anti-Dreyfus fanatic had murdered Zola by blocking the flue of his stove, so causing carbon monoxide poisoning, is consistent with the evidence. The account of the aftermath reveals a personal connection – Michael Rosen’s great-uncle, Oscar, was on the same “Convoi 61”, to Auschwitz, as Dreyfus’ granddaughter, Madeleine Dreyfus Levy.

First-class scholarship, and a light touch on a dark story. Recommended.

Nicky Morgan on social mobility.

The former Conservative Secretary of State for Education has posted this on the lack of social mobility in the UK. I've replied as follows:

Attempts to improve the education of these pupils continue to be hampered by the errors of the sixties, in the Newsom and Plowden reports, both commissioned by Conservative Secretaries of State, but seized upon by Labour in a way that made a system that was not working for everyone, work for fewer and fewer people.

The key errors are mixed ability teaching, which prevents teachers from matching work closely enough to children's learning needs, Plowden's replacement of literacy with first-hand experience as the basis of primary education - her committee actively discouraged schools from reading non-fiction - and Newsom's modular examinations, which gave us the coursework grind that we are in the process of getting rid of.

You can't start building a house half-way up the walls. A combination of long working hours and limited parental experience of education bring these children to school with very limited language skills. The gap increases as they move through school, as highly educated parents, naturally and rightly, pour their own educational capital into their children every time they speak to them. A current pupil's mother understands why she can't do this, and tells me she is learning alongside her daughter. This is quite right - the words we meet as we read are not those that are required for getting through daily life, getting up and to school on time (ono) and running the house. Jean Chall's The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall behind remains a key text on the effects of this in the transition to secondary school. Highly educated parents have equipped their children with the words they need to understand their new textbooks, and parents without such education have not. The gap widens.

A project in Basildon led by Sir Michael Tomlinson, former HMCI, has tackled this issue at its root, by grouping children according to their learning needs from the start, and working with parents. It is due to publish soon. I've visited one of the schools involved, and will be happy to share information.

Anxiety, depression and education. Is there a solution?

Guardian has an interesting article on the incidence of anxiety in young people, quoting the statistic that 79% are anxious in starting a new school. My alter ego, Quaestor, posted this comment:

Many of us experience anxiety in new situations, and I'm happy to admit that I'm one of them. If, in fact, it amounts to 79% of children starting a new school, this is no great surprise.

No one, though, is claiming that 79% of children are mentally ill. So, the work that is needed is not sensationalism, but a thorough examination of the scale and nature of the problem. If the pattern is one of anxiety escalating into mental illness, rather than diminishing over time as it does for most of us, then we need to know what causes the escalation, and how we can prevent it.

I've put forward the idea that continuous assessment is a major source of anxiety, based on very close observation of pupils I've worked with, and my personal experience of it at university. It is also fairly well established that some people become very anxious at final assessments. I dare say nearly everyone experiences some anxiety taking a driving test, though some people may not. What we need is some properly conducted research, by which I mean research carried out by people who do not start from their conclusion, if such can be found.

Stem4, the site mentioned in the article, offers an interesting analysis of current evidence, and practical advice.

More scandal.

The corruption foisted on the British education system by Labour's noxious combination of targets and school-based assessment continues. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that this is their fault. Worried that the education system was meeting the needs of richer pupils with extensive, and at times expensive, parental support, they tried to even things up by means of "vocational" qualifications with imaginary equivalences to normal GCSEs, with targets for schools to meet and dire punishment if they didn't. People started to cheat to preserve their school's reputations and protect their jobs. At the same time, Blunkett's department forced schools to put up with the same atrocious behaviour he would condemn, by putting heavy financial penalties on anything they did to try to stop it.

The coalition government started to change this by getting rid of the controlled assessments and cutting down on unnecessary examinations, notably abolishing AS. However, this is taking time, and in the meantime the toxic blend of corruption and bullying continues.

The article is, of course, anonymous. The writer would probably never work again if he or she were to sign it. I have not named the schools in which I've seen this at first hand, some of them rated good or outstanding by Ofsted, because that would also lead to victimisation. I'm fortunate in that no-one is in a position to victimise me, or I'd probably have to keep quiet too. Teachers have families.

This must stop, and removing all school-based assessment is the only way to do it.

Churchill, language and education, with implications for foundation examinations and Further Education.

Three of Churchill’s comments, respectively on education, communication, and examinations, can be of great help to us in solving current problems.   The first two are his tribute to his teacher of grammar,  who showed him how to construct a sentence, and his statement that, “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all”. Children do not, for the most part, know enough Latin and Greek to understand the basis of terminology derived from them, and this terminology too often creates a mystique that obscures learning instead of promoting it.

In geometry, for example, the difficult word Isosceles is just Greek for two equal legs, and a theorem is something that we can prove on the basis of things we already know. I was taught many theorems at school without anyone ever explaining to me what such a thing actually was, and similar problems persist. Maths compresses language, frequently inventing its own vocabulary and symbols to do so. All of this needs to be unpacked and practised if most children are to learn maths – going past anything that is not understood creates a block that can last a lifetime. Churchill’s principles of communication are as important and effective in education as they were in politics.

Of examinations, Churchill said that, “the questions … were almost invariably those to which I was unable to suggest a satisfactory answer. I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.”

In the security queue at Westminster some weeks ago, I met two ladies who were principals of Further Education colleges in London. One told me that she had over 2,000 students retaking maths and English at GCSE. That seemed a lot, until the second announced that she had 4,000. A friend’s son, in charge of maths in a home counties college, has 3,500 students. Each of these figures is larger than almost any school.  The unfortunate lecturers have around eight months to get to know the students and turn round a lifetime of disappointment, with predictable results – the failure rate last year was 70 per cent, the highest I’ve ever heard of in a public examination.

The students are acutely aware of their situation and, unsurprisingly, hacked off with it. My friend commented that his son could cope with all sorts of difficulties in learning maths, but was now faced with sustained unwillingness to work. The reason is not hard to grasp. Almost all of us, setting out to achieve something important – and everyone knows that maths is important – give it our best shot, and are prepared, like Robert the Bruce’s spider, to keep trying if we don’t get it right first time. But if we’ve been failing for eleven years, and are given material that we have no hope of understanding, because we don’t know the elements on which it is based, or understand the language and symbols in which it is expressed, we are worse off than the spider. We don’t have a thread to climb.

Unsurprisingly, the two college principals felt that their sector was a poor relation, and that their lecturers were hard-working people facing an impossible task. By co-incidence, one of them was head of the college that had asked me to lead a revision day last year, so that I had seen the truth of their situation for myself. Sir Michael Wilshaw was asked at the presentation of his final annual review if the requirement for all students to resit GCSE “wasn’t working,” and he replied diplomatically that it may be worth considering “some form of test of fundamental skills.”

Sir Michael was right, and his comment brings me back to Churchill. The foundation level of these maths papers, which most resit students take, has far too many questions that insert a twist to force students to apply what they know in a situation that is not obvious. An example from a sample paper is a question asking them to prove that a triangle in a diagram is Isosceles, when it is deliberately drawn without two equal sides. Another is to ask them to calculate the cost of providing some cakes for a party, involving five separate calculations, ending with the amount of change they’ll receive.

These little steps and twists add appropriate rigour to higher level papers, but prevent foundation students from showing what they know in a straightforward way, and shove their limitations down their throats. GCSE foundation papers, and not just in maths, need to be redesigned on Churchill’s principles.

This posting first appeared on Conservative Home.

Geometry without tears: Laying the ghost of Euclid.

The tears - or, more accurately the four-hour sessions of homework, ending in complete incomprehension and occasional migraine - were mine. This was maths, and therefore important, so I had to do it and couldn't. The late Bill Shankly said that football was not a matter of life and death, but something much more important. So was maths. The cleverest pupils could do in ten minutes what I couldn't do in four hours. Across Europe, I'm quite sure that millions of people are in the same position. Hundreds of thousands of FE students in the UK are set up to fail maths yet again, with no hope of passing, and in a state of despair or passive revolt. 

Euclid appears in illustrations as an old man with downcast eyes, sparse hair and a straggly beard. His work is available, free,  here, with explanations from Professor David E Joyce of Clark University, Worcester, Massachussetts. I am extremely grateful to Professor Joyce for enabling me to lay the ghost of a man I saw as my tormentor. Professor Joyce describes Euclid's elements as "beautiful and influential". For most of those who approach it, it does not have these qualities, because, with the best of intentions, it is mistaught.

To begin at the beginning, Euclid used a plain straight edge,  compasses of some sort, and some means of writing, probably akin to a pencil. He did not own a protractor, or a marked ruler. These items are universal in secondary schools, and were my undoing. They encourage people to approach problems by measuring them, and this runs counter to Euclid's system of logic - you can't be sure that your measurement is completely accurate. You can, on the other hand, be sure of the logic that stems from Euclid's simple axioms - for Professor Joyce, Common Notions - and postulates. The only angle measurement in Euclid's work is the right angle - others are described in relation to it. The key to his logic is is that if two items are equal to a third item, they are equal to each other. Mathematicians have pointed to the limitations of Euclid's logic, as these suppositions are themselves not proved. For example, Euclid says that all right angles are equal to each other, but does not set out to prove it, perhaps because it is not possible to prove it - he would have had no way of proving that right angles drawn on two pieces of papyrus, were in fact equal to each other.

Proposition 1  shows the method to perfection, and is easy to teach. Draw a straight line, not too long for your piece of paper, but do not measure it. Set your compasses to the length of the line, and draw a circle centred on one end of it. Do the same from the other end. Both of your circles are equal to each other, because they have the same radius - the distance from the centre of a circle to its edge is always the same, or it isn't a circle. So, joining the two ends of the line, to the point at which the circles intersect, creates a triangle in which all sides have this radius, and are therefore equal. It works every time, and is a perfect introduction to Euclid's system of logic. The rest follows.

Professor Joyce has performed a most important service, in making this work freely available to those of us who have needed it - pro bono publico, of the first order.

Conclusion: Protractors and marked rulers should not be used in the teaching of Euclidian geometry. They are a worse distraction than mobile phones. A phone, on the other hand,  can provide an unmarked straight edge...