English
Events
Author Matt Dickinson visits Oxford High School
Author Matt Dickinson visited Oxford High School on Thursday 2nd February to talk about his new book, Mortal Chaos, and his adventures as a filmmaker for National Geographic Channel. The students were gripped by his tales of daring on icy surfaces. The book was actually published (by OUP) that same day, so girls were able to buy the very first editions. It is the first in a trilogy, and everyone who has got hold of a copy is already saying it is absolutely gripping, and they can’t wait to see the second – which just might be in the hands of the OHS librarian as a proof copy!
The White Devil
Why do we want to put on and watch this play, four hundred years after it was first written and performed? Maybe it’s because its obsessions remain our own. Flamineo and Vittoria’s dying rejection of the court, with its flattery and its malice, express our own contemporary mistrust of the fawning and viciousness of government and the press. Real tenderness and regret are in the play too, as Flamineo weeps at his mother’s deranged grief: ‘I have a strange thing in me, to th’ which/ I cannot give a name, without it be/ Compassion.’
The greatest pleasure, as always, has been working with the cast as we’ve discovered together the bizarre jokes of 1612 and the disturbing veins of fantasy and misogyny that run through the play. All life is here and, if it makes us squirm with recognition at some points, that’s no bad thing.
Connected Curriculum at the Pitt Rivers Museum
On Wednesday 28th September all of Year 8 enjoyed a trip to the Pitt Rivers museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This was part of a ‘connected curriculum’ day where Art, English, and Religious Studies came together.
The girls walked down to the museums through the parks in glorious sunshine and began by exploring and sketching the ‘ghost forest’ exhibition of trees outside. Then we split into groups and were led by the Pitt Rivers staff into the wonderful world of the museums. A particular focus of the trip was the collection of artefacts from the Haida people, including the iconic Pitt Rivers totem pole. This built on work the girls are doing in RS. In Art the girls are creating totem poles based on coil pots depicting animals that are important to them. The time in the two museums looking closely at how animals are depicted proved inspirational for this art project. For English, the girls were set to seek out (or perhaps be grabbed by) an object that ‘spoke’ to them, and they are now telling the stories of these objects as follow-up work in class.
In the afternoon the girls returned to school and, after a special lunch together, worked in house groups on a creative response to the stimulus of the morning. They created sculptures and presentations which reflected their shared values.
Feedback and evaluation of the day indicates that it was a great success and the girls enjoyed broadening their learning and making the most of the resources available to us in Oxford.
Y13 English study weekend in Medway, Kent
This year we chose a new venue for our annual Y13 study weekend – the Medway district of Kent, famed for its connections with Dickens, and its proximity to Chaucer’s Pilgrims’ Way. On a sunny Friday afternoon, we wondered at the romance of Rochester’s Restoration House (Satis House in Great Expectations), and shared our thoughts on Pip’s first arrival at Miss Havisham’s, and Matilda’s experiences of Rochester in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip (later we played her game of spotting the local businesses that exploit the Dickens’ connection – an apple from Pips of Rochester anyone?). We followed up with hilarious readings of the opening of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, which we continued in appropriately poetic (doggerel?) fashion in the grounds of Rochester castle. In the cathedral crypt, we staged an impromptu performance of Doctor Faustus’ encounter with the Seven Deadly Sins.
Struck by the concrete expanses of ring roads, motorways and industrial estates in this part of the world, it was a relief to discover our youth hostel was in a little green oasis – and was in fact a former Kentish oast house. Our intrepid and forbearing coach driver Colin took us out after supper in the gathering gloom to the Kentish marshes; several wrong turns and an almost total bus-diagonally-wedged-in-right-angle-bend later, it was completely dark and we bailed out at Cliffe churchyard to read the opening of Great Expectations by torchlight. Esme Alleyn proved a terrifying Magwitch, especially as she had to compete for volume with the bell-ringing practice carrying on meanwhile. Buoyed by this unforgettable experience, we struck out on the marshes themselves, where a red moon brooded over the distant Thames estuary, and read the opening of Heart of Darkness.
Saturday took us to the Historic Dockyard at Chatham, which was holding a 40′s day with lots of splendid costumes, role play and entertainment. Under the canopy of one of the many huge warehouses, we read and performed extracts from Vanity Fair and Our Mutual Friend, before boarding a paddle steamer for a trip upstream to see the historic barracks, the Victorian rope factory (a whole lot more amazing than it sounds), and, yes, more examples of modern Kentish road-building. By now accustomed to concrete wasteland, the empty expanses of the North Downs in the afternoon were like a dose of Optrex. As we padded along the Pilgrims’ Way, we stopped to read extracts from Canterbury Tales; Mrs Redston treating us to her legendary Middle English. In a wide open field, we were indignant on behalf of John Clare’s Badger. In the evening, we shared our anthology pieces at the hostel – it has been great to see such variety in the students’ own choices of literature and in their approaches to them.
On Sunday we left Kent for London, and a bracing tramp on Hampstead Heath prepared us to be Freddy, George and Mr Beebe desporting themselves at the bathing pool, before being surprised naked by Lucy and her mother (we stopped short of total verisimilitude here). The beautiful Keats’ house was our final destination, where we reflected on his poignant letters to girl-next-door Fanny Brawne, before reading and discussing Ode to a Nightingale in the garden.
We returned in the afternoon, full of ideas to carry into our coursework study of Vanity Fair and Birthday Letters.
Y12 trip to Rousham gardens May 2011
On a sunny Sunday in May, just before AS exams kicked in, Y12 English students enjoyed a leisurely afternoon in beautiful Rousham Gardens. The trip helped us to visualise the landscape gardens of Sidley Park in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, and we were able to appreciate the great shifts in taste from the ornate Palladian garden to William Kent’s picturesque. We read poetry by Pope and Keats and extracts from Austen, before exploring the garden and sharing proposals for Noakes-style re-modellings of various corners along Romantic lines – something we accomplished very satisfactorily over an indulgent picnic tea.
Personnel
The English Department is proud of its long tradition of teaching classic and contemporary texts in innovative ways. We enjoy working collectively but value our individuality highly. We are open to your involvement in our department. In recent years we have welcomed High School parents such as Dr Michael Dobson (of Birkbeck College), Dr Helen Small (of Pembroke College, Oxford) and Professor Christopher Butler (of Christ Church, Oxford) to give seminars and speak. Professor John Mullan of UCL comes all the way from London to give talks or we meet up with him in London museums. Just email Julie Runacres if you feel inspired to join them, as our network of academics grows.
Julie Runacres is Head of English. She discovered teaching via an earlier career in the City, and is thrilled to be leading such a vibrant department. Her particular loves are teaching poetry and creative writing; when she’s not doing either of these, she enjoys jogging in the Cotswolds, and travelling with her family. As SENCO and Gifted and Talented Co-ordinator, she’s also the person to approach with any queries about provision for pupils with any kind of learning difference.
Mari Girling is inventive and full of amazing energy. As editor of the magazine, she leads the committee and each year produces a yet more dynamic publication. She is a stained glass artist and a generator of community projects in East Oxford. She is also a director and gave us a fabulous A Midsummer Night’s Dream recently. She is in charge of Citizenship and PSHE and, within the department, runs the annual scrapbook and other holiday competitions.
Cathy O’Neill‘s passion is for directing plays and teaching Drama. As well as English, she teaches Year 11 Drama and directs a Jacobean tragedy with the Sixth form each year: this term it’s Women Beware Women. As Head of Careers at OHS, she is central to the process of university entrance and how students progress from school to university, and in preparing for life beyond school and university.
Stephanie Masterson loves Drama too and develops improvisations and performances in her English teaching with her classes in Years 7 to 9; she also loves teaching American novels, something she’s developed in preparation for year 13 coursework, as well as at GCSE. She is a great traveller (she lived in Turkey for years) and dances and practises yoga.
Ginnie Redston‘s warmth and generosity endear her to her pupils across the year groups. She is very experienced but always open to new ideas. She loves film and has more DVDs than the rest of us put together. She is embarking on a Masters at the University of Birmingham, Shakespeare Institute, as she has been an RSC groupie for years!
Alison Kelly is the latest addition to our department. She has relished the invigorating plunge into teaching in the last decade, after many years among the bookshelves of academic publishing. She is maddest about prose fiction, and has published a critical study of the American writer Lorrie Moore as well as reviews of new books for the Observer and the Times Literary Supplement
Facilities and Resources
The English department is housed in a new dedicated suite of rooms in the Mary Warnock School of Music. As you go into the building, the first thing you’ll notice is how light it all is: the windows open on to grass and trees – a favourite haunt of drama-focused lessons in the summer – and the glass panels that give on to the corridor mean that every lesson takes place with a sense of being part of the vibrant life of the whole Department. Girls may spill out of classrooms, books in hand, rehearsing their own performances of a scene from Shakespeare. Sixth formers cluster together round a large table, intent on their discussion of Milton, Chaucer or T. S. Eliot. All around them are samples of students’ work, from all year groups. No long-forgotten essays hastily pinned to notice boards here: our work celebrates the diversity of the girls’ experience in English, and you can expect to find stunning visual responses to literary texts; inventive creative writing; and astute and personal responses to both literary and non-fiction/media texts.
Each classroom has a computer with DVD, and TV with video-player. We are gradually acquiring projectors for all rooms and, while we wouldn’t claim to be at the cutting-edge of technology, we’re far from techno-phobic! We make use of the school’s ICT resources as required to support the girls’ writing and guide them in judicious and informed use of the Web to complement their research in the school library.
Curriculum
What we try to do is explore both classic and contemporary texts. We do not want our students to think that literature stopped in the middle of the twentieth century. Our reading lists, compiled by the students with our guidance, ensure that they can all keep pace with novels being written now. We are often impressed by how familiar our students are with books from all periods and genres. Encouraged by Elizabeth Sloan, the librarian, and their English teacher they might read the short listed Booker prize books or the Carnegie. Our annual Reading Week gives a sense of the importance of finding time for reading in a busy life.
Rather than giving you an exhaustive list of all we do in English it might help you to get a flavour of how we work in this subject by describing a series of lessons from various sections of the school. If you would like a detailed description of the curriculum, do email us and we can send it to you.
In Year 7, one class got an insight into the world of publishing through creating their own books for pre-school children. They researched ways in which existing picture books appeal to small children and created their own along similar lines. Forming into groups, they created their own publishing companies with logos and developed a range of marketing strategies. The unit culminated in a Book Fair in the classroom, and a visit to the Junior School to read the books to a lively and responsive audience of Nursery, Reception and Year 1 children!
In Year 9, classes have studied novels by Dickens and Austen, and used the template of social networking sites as a way of tracking the development of characters in the texts. Using the opening of film versions of Emma and of the 1995 US teen lifestyle parody Clueless, girls worked in role as directors identifying and explaining the choices of shot, soundtrack and voiceover that established key characters and mood. In a unit on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, girls enacted The Franklin’s Tale as a sequence of still images that were photographed and then captioned as a short video on a movie-making program.
At GCSE we have enjoyed the challenges of a new specification with an increased focus on creative writing, which we build regularly into our teaching, and responses to unseen poetry and literary prose. Rather than being tied to a limited range of set text poems, the girls have each worked with two great anthologies, Poems for Life and Staying Alive, and had considerable independence in choosing poem pairs for comparison and close analysis. One group recorded radio programmes on the Desert Island Discs model, selecting poems that made an impact on them and explaining their choices in relation to the poet’s ideas and methods, either as themselves, or in role.
At AS level we are working with the new WJEC specification. The opportunity to study Tess of the d’Urbervilles for coursework prose study, and to illuminate our readings of it with novels as diverse as Notes on a Scandal and The Scarlet Letter, was irresistible. We are also relishing the challenges of the Creative Reading coursework, in which girls write their own pieces in response to a literary prose text and reflect on their choices in relation to the stimulus text, its contexts, and their own. Studying T S Eliot’s poetry alongside Yeats’, and exploring Stoppard’s Arcadia, have opened up exciting discussions for the Poetry and Drama paper, and we were hugely fortunate in having Dr David Bradshaw conduct a seminar that developed new perspectives on ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘The Second Coming’ . Our Period and Genre study coursework in Year 13 focused on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene; the girls chose their own third texts, many drawing inspiration from the texts encountered on the residential weekend in London.
Extra-Curricular Activities and Achievements
An important part of the experience of English at Oxford High is what happens outside the classroom. Theatre trips are always being arranged. We run an English at University class for Year 13 students during the Autumn term to discuss texts beyond the syllabus.
We always welcome visitors to the department. We are particularly fortunate in the ways in which parents play such an active part in the life of English at OHS as visiting lecturers or just as friendly supporters of all our events. Come and see how English has changed since you were at school and yet how the pleasures of acting plays, saying poems aloud and arguing about texts remain the same.