Bags and Chris reflect on the news of the demise of our national assessment scheme

What do you do when you have a class who don’t engage?

In the third week of the school year, Chris and Gena explored the new year as a fresh start, including Chris’ newly ‘upgraded’ classroom (complete with LEDs and a lava lamp). The conversation shifted to celebrating Gena’s outstanding achievement of three English scholarships at Otago Boys, including one outstanding scholarship. We discussed the importance of maintaining high expectations, establishing powerful routines, and the positive impact this has on student learning. We reflected on how setting ambitious targets ourselves models the very dispositions we ask of our students, and shared insights about the learning relationships we build with boys who may not verbalise appreciation often but deeply value rigorous, disciplined learning environments.

As a coda to last week’s episode about the harm AI is doing to boys’ learning in English classes, today Bags and Chris offer some discrete and specific examples of what actually happens in their English classrooms.

Bags talks about the analysis of the Denis Glover poem ‘The Magpies‘

Chris talks about how he works with his senior students to interrogate the ways deliberate use of a variety of sentence types support their writing of humour and satire. You can listen to a podcast that I made for that class that explains this in more detail, and there you can also find links to actual classroom resources – data show, handouts – in case you want to interrogate it further.

This was our last episode for the 2024 Southern Hemisphere academic year, see you in February.

We may be in the minority, but Bags and Chris are in full accord on this one: AI is going to do untold damage to boys’ learning in English.

Only this week, articles in the Christchurch Press Number of illiterate uni students ‘at crisis level’ and the Otago Daily Times Despair over Literacy Levels demonstrate that the literacy of University students in the towns where we teach is falling off a cliff–and we already know that this is even worse for boys.

This conversation explores exactly why AI is such a disaster for the classroom, what we’re doing about it, and why we think it should go the way of the “Whole Language” approach to the teaching of reading and “Modern Learning Environments” – straight to the dustbin; preferably before the learning of a generation of young men is sacrificed.

Bags explores how she creates rich discussion in her English classroom.

Bags and Chris compare notes on how they tend to approach the preparation of students for the Unfamiliar Texts section in the New Zealand English Scholarship examination.

Bags relays an experience she had recently with a student who was struggling to speak in front of the class and then Chris grabs the microphone and talks for too long in order to attempt to explain how Grammar for Writing actually works in the context of a Year 9 classroom.

Around this time of the year, across the Motu, teachers in secondary schools crack out their very best craft skills and upgrade the displays in their classrooms and departments in readiness for the school Open Evening.

Bags and Chris talk about this phenomenon (and the many things you find yourself responsible for as a teacher) as well as the Structured Literacy pedagogy that is now mandated in New Zealand primary schools.

8 Years ago, Bagley’s daughter Scarlett died, age 7. We take some time in this episode to examine how this deep loss strengthens her work in the classroom.

Rarely does anyone gain an insight like this into the privacy of another person’s grief. As a listener to this podcast perhaps you’ll get a sense of the honesty and inner strength that makes Bags such a successful classroom teacher of English.

Shakespeare features too. Of course.