While English as a subject thrives on face-to-face interaction between teachers and students, our department has responded to the challenge and done its very best to keep your children focused and enjoying their study. Through the creative use of technology, via Teams and One Note, students have meaningful and immediate contact with the teacher. In addition, they have shared ideas and cooperated on tasks in small groups of four or five, thereby retaining the classroom environment online as much as possible. Colleagues have been incredibly flexible and imaginative in their interactions with the students and in planning the various study units, activities and setting tasks.
If you take a brief glance at the range of topics explored this semester, you can appreciate how the department has addressed the difficulties with resilience and imagination. In G6 Language Acquisition, students have enjoyed weaving the escapism of the study of myths and legends with the current world-shattering tragedy. In the G7 Language and Literature classes they explored the bleak vision of dystopian texts and wrote their own, in G9’s study of Lord of the Flies, students imagined a world without rules gone mad. They have contemplated the absurdity of existence in G11 Literature and explored our changing relationship with the environment in English B.
The tasks, too, have engaged and stretched students; they have worked on music for Macbeth and poetry as protest, have performed speeches in character and looked at the world through a post-colonial lens, analysed painting, sculpture, film, graphics, poetry and everything else you might think of while considering the Global connections between genres. As we anticipate the end of this school year with all its troubles, we also look further ahead to coming together again in September.
See you then!
- Patrick Curran, Head of Subject Group - English
