How it used to
be: May 2015
It’s Double English for the bottom set of our
fifteen-year-olds, and Google Translate is my friend. I wasn’t timetabled to be in their lesson
yesterday, and I arrive today to discover that they’ve just started Macbeth.
Along with the rest of the class, the blond and lethargic Ukrainian
giant, and the shy skinny girl from the Dominican Republic (via Spain) who have
been in the school only a few months and still have minimal English, have been
equipped with three pages of a comic strip summary of the plot, based on
characters from The Simpsons; so has
the headscarved girl who’s just arrived from Syria, and speaks no English at
all. The sheets aren’t numbered, and the
students have stuck them into their exercise books out of sequence, so that
they make even less sense. The Syrian
girl has been placed next to another Arabic speaker, a lumbering Lebanese girl
who has lived in Britain all her life; I have my doubts about her effectiveness
as a mentor, as she is rather dim, and exceptionally indolent.
The commendably willing and determined young newly qualified
teacher talks her class through a Powerpoint with a different Simpsons summary of Macbeth,
occasionally diverting into photos of various stage or film productions of the
play. It strikes me how tricksy and
idiosyncratic most professional productions of Shakespeare are these days, when
what we desperately want is something straightforward, that just provides a
crib for the text. Our three Somalis
start getting restive, variously rapping or swearing or emitting very loud,
random screeches; there are plenty of conscientious, academically able Somalis
in this school, but none of them are in this class. One cheery little Afghan boy, who’s very
dyslexic, goes to sleep, while a Pakistani girl with special needs, who is
barely literate in English or Urdu, busily copies everything down regardless.
I chiefly deal with the three who speak the least
English. I do witch impressions, and
thunder and lightning impressions, while Google Translating the words on my
laptop into a potpourri of languages.
The impressions are appreciated; even the Syrian girl, who is sweet but
serious, smiles. I instruct the
Ukrainian boy and the Spanish girl to get out their phones (which they are not
allowed in school), and help them to find the Wikipedia entry for Macbeth in their languages; I find the
same thing in Arabic on my laptop for the Syrian girl, and leave them all
ploughing their way through the lengthy plot summaries.
Everyone else has been given a short, jumbled plot summary
in nine boxes which they have to cut out and stick into the right order. I run around and rescue those people who are
sticking them in completely at random, and number the boxes for them correctly,
in case they should ever be able or willing to read the words; when I go back
to my group, I help them do theirs, and try to deal with the Ukrainian, who
asks me, very haltingly, if William Shakespeare killed Banquo; I get him to
look up Shakespeare on his phone.
In ten days’ time, the whole year group, including this
class, have to submit the first draft of a 1,000-word piece of GCSE coursework
entitled: To
what extent is Lady Macbeth presented as a strong character in the play?
There are a number of lunacies in operation here, but the
chief of them is this: it is recommended policy in this school, as in many
others, that students who arrive with little or no English should attend all
the normal lessons, rather than start with an intensive foundation course in
beginners’ English, as happens in more rational places. It’s a policy which this school follows
slavishly: any specific EAL (English as an Additional Language) coaching has to
be held before or after school, or at lunch-time, and is usually just once or
twice a week. As a result, students can
be in the school for years, and still write in pidgin – pidgin inexpertly
ornamented with sporadic fancy terminology, such as ‘oxymoron’, ‘connotation’, or
‘pathetic fallacy’.
At midnight, as Google Translate and I prepare three
different bilingual summaries of Macbeth for
my target three students, I hope against hope that someone with the necessary
clout will do something about this madness. And it’s no consolation to reflect
sardonically that Macbeth is a story
that should resonate well with Syrians, Ukrainians, Afghans and Somalis, all of
them only too familiar with “dismal conflict” …
How it is now: September
2016
How things can change in a year! All these problems are over for the support
teacher, because there are no more
support teachers in the school, nor are there teaching assistants. Classroom teachers have total responsibility
for the students with little or no English, as well as for those with special
needs. The funding situation decrees
that it shall be so. Refugee children
have been trickling in under the Dubs Amendment, under the Vulnerable Persons’
Resettlement Programme, and under the Dublin III Regulation, but how are they
going to assimilate or get a job if they have no proper foundation in English?
