School Days

John Cooper Clarke – punk poet, performance poet, anarchist, debunker of myths… and supporter of Michael Gove? Really? Yes – really. In one aspect at least. The poet who rarely publishes, preferring instead to perform his works to live audiences, foxed Radio 4’s Front Row presenter recently when he stated, very firmly, that he was with Gove in his insistence on children learning poetry by heart. Poetry is all about the sound, he said, and the way to get the sound is to learn the poetry and say it out loud.

I’m teaching poetry to Year Nine at the moment, and it is always a little tricky to get them onside. ‘I hate poetry’ is the cry of at least three-quarters of any group; so you have somehow to find a way in. And I am feeling quite smug about my most recent lesson.

‘Hands up if you really hate food’ was my opening gambit, and they all looked at me really blankly. Not a hand went up.

‘OK. Hands up if you really hate music.’ Blank faces. Hands down.

Over the years, I’ve tried various introductions to poetry, but this one went the best. Rap artists strutting their stuff works up to a point. But it panders to them too much and usually ends with pleas for more of the same until you are trapped into playing something vile.

But this time, they did begin to think. They appreciated that you might not like a certain type of curry, but it did not mean you hated all curry. They were prepared to argue the point that poetry could be seen as music or, at any rate, musical.

So then we turned to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130: ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.’ The very mention of Shakespeare obviously puts any red-blooded Somerset son of the soil into a panic; so how to get round that one?

Tom Lehrer’s She’s my Girl, of course. ‘Sharks gotta swim, and bats gotta fly; I gotta love one woman till I die. To Ed or Dick or Bob, she may be just a slob, but to me, well, she’s my girl… And I love her.’

And they laughed. Thirty young Somerset children laughed at an old white guy playing the piano. It made my heart glad. (I’ve used Lehrer before when teaching about sexually transmitted diseases – I Got it from Agnes is a corker.)

When teaching is fun – when it really works – is when you are willing to step away from the formulae of whatever is currently fashionable; when you can get the children to make connections and lose their fear. When, turning from Lehrer to Shakespeare, they actually react to what they are reading, rather than goofily looking for a simile they’re going to have to say something about.

‘Why is he even going out with her?’ one girl wailed after the line ‘In some perfumes is there more delight/than in the breath that from my mistress reeks’.

‘Why is she even going out with him if he’s writing about her like that?’ retorted another, more feminist student (a boy).

And then came the understanding at the payoff – ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/as any she belied with false compare’ – as their faces lift from their pages and comprehension dawns. And something else that makes teaching fun – learning something from them.

‘Wait, miss, it’s some sort of Shakespearean diss track,’ I was told.

I had to have the term explained to me. Apparently, it’s a type of song which is basically foul about a girl. And I had to promise that I would not Youtube any as they were too horrible for me.

Seventeen years in, sometimes it’s hard to remember why you went into teaching in the first place. And then a lesson like that happens.