English

Events

Y13 residential study weekend in London

Y13 English students enjoyed a busy weekend in London in September as part of their coursework study of literary journeys, staying at the Holland Park youth hostel.

Our first day focused on the City, starting in Bloomsbury with the Sir John Soane Museum, then taking in Dr Johnson’s house (on his 300th birthday!) and St Paul’s cathedral, where we read and discussed Blake’s poem ‘Holy Thursday’ from Songs of Innocence. Working our way down to the Thames, we visited the church of St Magnus Martyr by the Monument, and revelled in the new perspective it gave us on T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. In the evening we explored the Indian galleries at the V&A and discussed some post-colonial texts, including A Passage to India and The Buddha of Suburbia.

Saturday began with a trip down the Thames to Greenwich; we enjoyed the irreverent commentary of our guide before sitting by the river to study the opening of Heart of Darkness, and to do an impromptu re-enactments of the opening of Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the water-taxi episode from Shakespeare in Love! (They are curiously related…) At the National Maritime Museum we reflected on London’s importance as a centre of trade and exploration, before doing a bit of our own with a browse in Greenwich market. A trip on the Docklands Light Railway took us to Tower Hill, where we began a long and surprisingly arduous trek along the South Bank to see remnants of Dickens’ London, and to sit in the courtyard of an ancient Southwark inn for a group rendition of Chaucer’s General Prologue in Middle English! Some unwinding in the shops was called for by this time, and after all this we felt we deserved our delicious meal back in High Street Kensington, and an exhausted flop back at the YHA.

On Sunday we headed out to Hampstead and the Heath (The Woman in White…) and over to the newly-reopened Keats’ house, where we sighed over his poignant Letters to Fanny Brawne and sat in the garden to share our responses to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. We lingered a little too long, however, and a frenetic dash with bags ensued to catch our train from Paddington in the early afternoon. We made it intact though and, flu notwithstanding, have found rich possibilities in the texts we encountered, to complement our in-class study of Middlemarch and The Faerie Queene.

Winners of the World Book Day short story competition!

Congratulations to Hannah Tillmann-Morris and Emily Pritchard, both of 7S, for submitting a winning story to the World Book Day short story competition. Their story was selected from among 3000 entries to this national competition, and this is the second year running that we've had a winner. Emily and Hannah win lots of copies of the story anthology The Cry of the Wolf for the school, containing their story 'The Mask of Time', and were interviewed by BBC Oxford for both TV and radio.

The Changeling - November 2008

The Changeling is a challenge for any theatre group. Not daunted, a group of ten actors put on this disturbing Jacobean tragedy on November 10th to an audience of over a hundred parents, teachers and students.

During the eight- week rehearsal period we experimented with changeling mimes so that we discovered how to unpeel the layers of mask and reveal the passion within. Clare Thakker worked hard on creating a suitably grotesque face for De Flores (brilliantly played by Rachel Wilkinson). The whole cast created the closet into which Beatrice (brought to life superbly by Immy Gardam) is thrust by her husband, so that her cries as she is murdered by De Flores came from a human enclosure.

The whole experience of creating the drama was absorbing. Our production weekend was vital for finally putting the play together. After Malfi last year we are now beginning to see that a Jacobean tragedy might be an annual event, coming as it does so aptly in the darkness of November.

These photographs, taken by Jonathan Nicholl, give you a sense of the power of the performance.

Cathy O'Neill

Foyle Young Poets: OHS winners

We are delighted that Arabella Currie and Ivy Callaway have been selected from 10,000 entries in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award. On National Poetry Day (4 October) the girls travelled to the Unicorn Theatre in London to receive their prizes from the Foyle judges, Jo Shapcott and Daljit Nagra. Ari was among the top 15 winners and will be going back to The Hurst in Shropshire (where we took a group of students last June) for an Arvon writing course as her prize. Read their poems below.

My Hands

I exfoliate with sea salt
I moisturise in garlic
I rub raw pink chicken
smooth as a baby
and wet.
So I can smell
deep in my skin
all those meals that I’ve cooked.
Ginger mixed with onions
butter and cauliflower.
And sometimes
if the time is right
just inside my wrist
is salmon.
I’m proudest though of my left thumb
hard as a nut with its own grand canyon.
Here years of bluntly cutting cucumber have
given me my war wound
my armour plated thumb.
You my hands aren’t as soft as some
nor is your skin a pearly peach.
But with you in my kitchen
I can hold the whole world
and I can slice red pepper
at the speed
of light.
by Arabella Currie

You Used To Tell Me Stories

You were young.
Your father’s friend
entered your Nigerian home
in white linen.
Where are you going, you asked
‘To the house of God’
Will you see God, you asked
You were slapped.

At seven, sent to Eaton,
you wanted a mother.
After Oxford
you began to travel.
Having never stopped, You never stopped -
you and your partner
walked down
a Kenyan road
from church

My father cried.
He handed the phone to mother.

One, clean blow
to the skull. Robbers.
After your satchel.
Containing:
           one disposable camera,
           one notebook,
           swimming trunks.
Your partner made the phone call.

Where are you now Stephen?
‘Seeing God, Ivy’
by Ivy Callaway

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 Ann Pasternak-Slater (of St Anne’s, 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 Cathy O’Neill if you feel inspired to join them, as our network of academics grows.

Cathy O’Neill has led the department since 1992. She admires the imagination and energy of her teachers and loves leading such a vibrant and committed group. Her passion is for directing plays and teaching Drama. She now teaches Year 10 Drama, runs a lunchtime Drama club for Year 4 in the Junior School and has directed The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling in the last few years. The students ensure that we never stand still as they are always challenging received views and asking new questions. She is particularly interested in university entrance and how students progress from school to university.

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 hoping to direct The Winter’s Tale soon. She is in charge of PSHCE and, within the department, runs the annual scrapbook and other holiday competitions.

Julie Runacres is erudite, witty – even scurrilous – and full of the most brilliant teaching ideas. She runs the Creative Writing Club for Years 8 to 11 and writes poetry herself. She is Special Educational Needs and Gifted and Talented Co-ordinator at OHS, a job she does with real sensitivity and imagination.

Stephanie Masterson loves Drama too and has created an exciting street children improvisation with Year 8, using bits of Mayhew and Blake as stimulus. She loves teaching American novels. She is a great traveller (she lived in Turkey for years) and dances and practises yoga.

Ginnie Redston’s warmth and generosity make her an important addition to our department. She is very experienced but is 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 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, as she has been an RSC groupie for years!

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’ . We are anticipating exciting work on the Period and Genre study coursework, to include exploration of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

A weekend residential trip has long been a feature of our Y13 teaching in the Autumn term, and this year we are heading for London as part of our topic study on Journeys. Trips to the Sir John Soane, V&A and National Maritime Museums, Keats’ house, Hampstead Heath, and the South Bank will combine with a boat trip on the Thames and much reading - from the 14th century John Gower to 21st century Zadie Smith. Images from previous trips (in the Lake District and Somerset), are to be found in our Photo Gallery below.

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: went to the RSC production of The Winter’s Tale and this term have trips planned to see Arcadia and An Inspector Calls, both in London. 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.