Welcome 10X4!

Hello and welcome to the class English blog for 10X4. It was great to meet all the students on Friday, and thank you for the enthusiasm and ingenuity you showed when creating your team newspaper structures! I was encouraged to see so many of you co-operating and working well together as a team, and we’ll need much more of this over the next two years.

The point of this blog is really to help make sure that everyone who needs or would like to know is informed about what we are learning, how things are going and what work you need to complete at home. So, the primary audience is the students, but I’m also very keen that parents / guardians and any other interested parties are kept up to date, so they are best placed to support you. A situation where teacher, student and parents work together and all know what’s going on tends to get the best outcomes for students I think.

Beyond making elaborate, mobile-phone supporting structures, what are we going to learn? Well, we’ll being with a study of modern drama, using the play An Inspector Calls by JB Priestly as our central text. We’ll learn about the ways that dramatists create meaning in the words and directions that they provide, but also we’ll consider how decisions made by the director and actors can influence an audience. Basically, we are looking to improve our reading skills, and become more sophisticated, powerful and knowledgeable readers.

Beyond this, we’ll go on to study a range of texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and a range of poetry, particularly from Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. We’ll also produce our own creative writing and responses to media texts as well as completing two further Speaking and Listening assignments. Next year, we’ll also read Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, which will be your text for the exam. If you want to read the texts before studying them in class then that would be great. The fact is that students who read regularly, and who choose texts which offer them a little bit of challenge, are likely to do very well in this and most other subjects. As a result, your homework this week is to read for at least 45 mins (but if you’re reading something decent you’re likely to want to read more), and be prepared to discuss what you’ve read from Monday 14th September.

Finally, a word about motivation. Of course, a big part of why we are here is to get the best exam results we can, but that’s not the only, or most interesting reason to study. The English language and its millions of uses is a fascinating topic, and learning about it can make you more powerful, help you to enjoy the texts you see around you and enrich your enjoyment of life. If you approach the course with this in mind, rather than just grades and exams, you’ll enjoy it more and probably do better at the end of it as well.

Enough waffle. I’ll do my best to update the blog on a regular basis – if parents or students have any questions or points to make, feel free to leave a comment by clicking on the link below.
Mr Boulter