Introduction
I have had the most wonderful couple of weeks back home, seeing family and friends and making the most of the Christmas and New Year celebrations! However, P2 is dawning on me rather quickly, and I didn’t want to take the full 2 weeks off when I know I will only be doing my PGCE year once.
I know what I will be teaching in P2, so my priority has been making a start on reading any texts I may be teaching, and glancing over the medium-term plans in case there is anything I am totally not sure of. I have also made a start on the reading for my curriculum practice assignment. I anticipated I would spend some time looking at the EPS assignment, but I am waiting on my new PT to give me one of my ideas the ‘OK’ before starting that.
Due to this, this blog is slightly different to the others; I will be extending my usual ‘currently reading’ section to go through some of the books I have been looking at over the break.
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
I will be teaching sections of Bleak House as part of the 19thCentury prose unit I will be doing with the year 9s. I have read a simple summary of the book and, as I do enjoy a Dickens novel, I decided to give it a read as well. As I do not have the luxury of sitting down and simply reading all day, I anticipate this will take me a while to finish!
That being said, I am really enjoying it so far. The intense Dickens language requires me to focus harder than I do with some other texts, but I love the density it gives to the text, each description more intricate than the next.
I am completely curious about the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case and where this will lead the protagonists to at the end of the novel.
Mortal Engines – Phillip Reeve
One of my new year 9 students recommend this novel to me and I am very glad she did! It’s set in a dystopian future where cities act like predators and prey as they move around ‘eating’ each other. It is a unique and innovative idea, refreshing in terms of YA fiction, where things can tend to get a bit samey. That being said, the plot was fairly predictable – until the end! A film adaptation has recently been released, so I am excited to go and see that!
An Ideal Husband – Oscar Wilde
I finished this play in a matter of hours. I completely fell in love with it! I really enjoyed A Picture of Dorian Greywhen I studied it in my undergrad degree, so I had high hopes for this play! (I have also started The Importance of Being Earnest and loved that… until I lost it! (I have found it again now so will be resuming it!)).
I love the characters in this play, particularly Mrs Cheveley, the way she tries to undermine each character is very cleverly played out. Along with this, the complex relationships between all the characters proves to make a very interesting plot! Would recommend to anyone!
Kamikaze – Beatrice Garland
I have mentioned this poem in a blog post at the beginning of the year, so I won’t go into much detail about it. In a nutshell, it is a poem about family, shame and dishonour, after a Japanese Kamikaze pilot fails to complete his suicide mission. The more I read and analyse this poem, the more I fall in love with it! It is so cleverly written – one of my new discoveries in annotating was that it only had 3 sentences, and the speaker changes with each sentence. Every word has been carefully selected and framed in a particular way to amplify the meaning of the poem.
Exposure – Wilfred Owen
Exposure is another one of the poems from the GCSE AQA Power and Conflict anthology I have analysed over the break (I’m aiming at doing at least one a week!). I observed a lesson looking at this poem during P1, so I had a good baseline to start. The poem is about Owen’s struggle against the horrific conditions – life in trenches and the awful weather they faced – exposing the world to the truth about war. It is a harrowingly beautiful poem, only amplified in knowing that Owen died just days before the end of the war.
Other readings
For my curriculum practice assignment, I have decided to look at teaching Animal Farm from a Science of Learning Perspective. I started by refreshing my memory about the basics of SOL (taking out my handy cards given in the lecture!) and I am now slowly making my way through the reading list on blackboard… I am not sure how useful any of this will be when I get round to planning my assignment… but it feels good to get a head start on the reading!
J
Much Ado About Teaching 