Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

AO5 (critical engagement) has a reputation.  It arrives in lessons and mark schemes like a spectral presence: vague, unsettling, prone to terrifying otherwise confident students into silence.  ‘Different interpretations’, it whispers. ‘Critical debate’ . ‘Alternative readings’.

There are productions of Othello that make you wonder why the play isn’t simply retitled Iago. This was absolutely not one of them. 

Question: Compare the ways both writers transform personal pain into public performance. There are few moments more alarming than flipping over an A Level paper and realising the exam board has gone rogue.  That’s exactly how it felt in my imaginary Paper 3 this morning, when the unseen comparative poem turned out to be Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, paired without warning with Lily Allen’s ‘Pussy Palace’.

You know the feeling, you’ve paid for the flights.  You’ve wrestled with SPF, exchange rates, suitcase weight limits, and the mysterious disappearance of all chargers.  And somewhere between the airport WHSmith and the sun lounger, your teenager did something unexpected: they started reading a book.

Somewhere between the fourth bramble and the fifth step, my golden retriever puppy decided that she had experienced quite enough of coastal walks, thank you very much.  With the quiet dignity of a small Victorian child in a Dickens novel, she stopped dead in her tracks, sat down and gazed at me with the expression of one forced to walk barefoot to the workhouse. Reader, I carried her.

Changing your surroundings can change your thinking - and never more so than for A Level and IB students getting ahead of the game with their NEAs, HLEs or EEs.  (And if those acronyms mean nothing to you, enjoy your summer.  Coursework-free!)

What do you get when you cross Beckett with pop culture’s most laid-back duo? Potentially, something powerful.

Theatre is meant to take risks - and a production so joyous and kinetic is a gift.  It’s smart, messy, generous, and completely alive.  It’s Midsummer. It’s Madness.  It’s exactly the kind of anarchic disruption Shakespeare deserves.

So, where do all the important characters go? Romeo’s parents.  When their son is busy running around with the boys, getting married at 16, killing his rival, and being banished from the city, where are Lord and Lady Montague?  Busy with dinner plans?  

If you (or your teenager) are studying Edexcel A Level after the summer, you might be tackling the full Romantics selection - or just Keats.  For AQA, OCR, or IB, one or more of these revolutionary poets are likely to appear.  These long holidays offer the perfect opportunity to deepen understanding without cracking open another anthology... just yet.

You can always spot a Romantic.  They’re the heart-first thinkers who refused to believe that God or logic alone could explain the world.  The ones who turned away from convention and wrote about imagination like it mattered more than politics. Which, for many of them, it did.

Welcome to the strange twilight zone that is mid-May - the middle of exam season.  You may be starting to feel like you live with a ghost who only emerges for snacks, sighs a lot, and occasionally mutters something about "how many exams are left?".   Days are counted in exam papers.  Life is looking endlessly bleak.  Hurrah, it’s the mid-point moan: the bit where adrenaline has worn off, motivation is flagging, and no one’s quite sure what day it is (without looking at an exa

While much of Hong Kong enjoys the serenity of Buddha’s Birthday, lotus lanterns, temple visits, maybe even a rare moment of peace, parents of exam-taking students are more likely lighting incense in the vague hope it will cleanse the air of teenage angst and essay-induced doom.

I was working with one of my lovely A Level students the other day, and we were deep into our discussion of Hamlet - when it happened.  I got it. I got Hamlet.

There are some decisions in life that require deep contemplation.  Applying for a job.  Choosing a partner.  Picking your Desert Island Discs.  And then, there’s naming a puppy. 

Easter is nearly upon us, hurrah, up to three weeks for your child to revise for their exams.  Are you ready?  Are they? 

Rejection: the gut-punch every writer faces.  History is full of books dismissed before becoming literary classics. 

For those of us in the business of literature, St Patrick's day is a chance to celebrate Ireland’s unrivalled literary legacy.

Reading a book or watching a film and a dog appears, steel yourself. It is most likely about to be devastating shorthand for human despair.

Fear not.  Be it GCSE, IB, or A Level English Language and/or Literature, here are a few survival strategies... chocolate is involved.