School Days Sophia Waugh

There is always a lot of fuss about boys and English. Boys and education in general, actually, but boys and English in particular. The question is how to engage them when English is seen as a girls’ subject. (And it is odd that the flipside of that is the endless whining about the Dead White Males who are taught as school texts. Where were they when the memo went out that boys don’t want to write?)

I instinctively want to argue with the idea that it is a girls’ subject, but it remains true that boys do less well than girls in all subjects, and that the gap is wider in English and English literature than in other areas.

I also have to admit that, when a boy expresses pleasure or interest in my subject, it is a quick way to warm my heart. A boy I tutor turned to me recently, with a big smile, saying, ‘The thing is, English is such a cool subject’, and for that I will walk over coals to boost his grade. And given that we were studying Vathek, which is probably not the most accessible of books for a 17-year-old boy, his enthusiasm was especially pleasing (even if it was in part due to delight in being told about William Beckford’s unorthodox sex life).

One way I have discovered to ignite a boy’s interest is through etymology. Endless educational articles and blogs are written about the differences between boys and girls and how they learn. Of course there is always going to be an element of stereotyping or generalising in such works, but I do think boys quite like a puzzle. And they also like showing off. So, once you begin to set them on the trail of etymology, boys of almost every ability level will raise their heads and begin to sniff like a hound.

The more clever boys really love getting to grips with it and, even better, like to challenge me. One of the few homeworks I ever set which was done not only by every child in the class (a boys-only set) but for which more was done than was asked when I bravely set them a challenge. They had to find a word that I did not know or could not work out. It was not allowed to be subject-specific (ie a word from physics etc) but had to be a word that could be used in normal conversation.

The task had come about through one boy asking if I knew every word in the dictionary, to which I answered obviously not, but I would be prepared to try to work out any word. The aim was not to show off (although, let’s be honest, I did rather enjoy that aspect) but to impress upon them the joy of a wide vocabulary and the usefulness of knowing other languages. (How I wish we still taught Latin in state schools – but we have enough trouble impressing the joy of modern foreign languages upon them.)

The day came, and the boys charged eagerly into the room waving pieces of paper and shouting for their turn. It turned out some had worked in groups, poring through a dictionary to find as hard a word as they could.

Did I know all the words? Of course not. Did I work them all out? Mostly. Did the boys have an enjoyable English lesson? Definitely.

And then, the other day, a child started arguing with me about the connotations of some word or other and, in the silence that fell as the class watched this tussle, I heard one boy turn to another and say, in the broadest of Somerset accents, ‘He’s brave. He’s tangling with the Queen of Words.’

If anyone’s thinking of what to put on my gravestone, I’ll take ‘Don’t tangle with the Queen of Words’ quite happily.