Poem
When I was an English teacher - and that was nearly all my working life - I was more creative than most. I sought to engage children in different ways, get them interested in our language and feel genuine accomplishment no matter what level their literacy had reached. As years passed and the demands of formal examinations became more constraining, it became quite difficult to keep the candle of creativity burning, illuminating young minds. For instance, the so-called National Curriculum had us teaching proscribed Shakespeare texts to struggling youngsters so that they could have a stab at Key Stage Three exams that were essentially designed for middle class kids from leafy suburbs. I could feel my least able pupils' pain and past experience had taught me that this was not the way to bolster standards of literacy. In fact, it was often the way to make less able children feel more useless than they already felt. Historical trust in classroom teachers to do what was best had been s...