PREP – Page 4 – PREP in York | Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell

Tutoring trips in York, books books books and excitement at PREP HQ!

OK, so PREP HQ is my little house in Heworth, but nonetheless, excitement abounds!

English trips for tutees (and their families)

You may have seen my previous post about the trips I’ll be running this year. Kicking us off on Sunday 10th October will be a visit to York’s newly reopened, beautiful Art Gallery, where we’ll get inspired and creative and write some wonderful verse to complement the paintings and sculptures we see! All tutees are welcome – please remember that there is a small charge for entering the Gallery, and that Year 7-11 tutees will need to be accompanied by a parent. Do get in touch if you’d like to join us!

Books, books, books

I’m a little ridiculously excited by my ‘Book of the Week’ campaign. I’ve got to say that I had a really hard time whittling down my enormous list of ‘books everyone really must read’ to 52, but I got there in the end! Week 1’s is Year of Wonders and it’s an absolute corker – historical fiction that goes way beyond the usual kings/bodices/beheadings that are popular at the moment. It tells the true story of ‘the plague village’, Eyam, and is utterly compelling.

In other exciting book-y news, I’ve been asking tutees this week to tell me about their favourite books, and I’ll soon have a board of recommendations up for them all to peruse. Parents are welcome to make contributions too of course!

Literary Events 2015-2016 – PREP in York trips and visits!

I am really delighted and excited to share with you that I am planning a whole host of literary trips and visits for my tutees this year! Read on for all the details, and please do get in touch if you have any questions.

Parents are welcome to all events and must accompany tutees in Years 7-11. Please note that where there is an entrance fee, you will need to make the necessary arrangements yourself. You will also need to provide a packed lunch where appropriate.

You are welcome to bring friends and family; please let me know in advance how many of you there will be.

Other than entrance fees and theatre tickets, I am running all of these events and trips for free – I hope that lots of you will get involved and I look forward to seeing you!

Saturday October 10th, 10am

Visit to York Art Gallery – get creative and write poetry using paintings and scuptures as inspiration.

Wednesday November 18th, 7.30pm

Visit to the Grand Opera House for a performance of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ – 5 tickets available – please contact me asap to confirm your place! I have prepaid so the cost will be £12.50 each, to be paid to me in advance please.

Saturday December 5th, 10am

Visit to the Museum Gardens – discover the remains of the Roman Fortress and learn what the Romans have to teach us about rhetoric.

Saturday January 16th, 10am

Visit to York Minster – explore some of Shakespeare’s most famous Kings through text and history.

Saturday February 13th, 10am

Visit to the National Railway Museum – indulge yourself in your favourite children’s literature and turn your hand to writing some of your own.

Saturday March 12th, 10am

Visit to Fountains Abbey – walk in the shadows of the monks and discover some of the oldest religious texts in existence.

Saturday April 9th, 11am

Visit to Castle Howard – explore the house in the context of Brideshead Revisited and read extracts over a civilsed picnic!

Saturday May 14th, 11am

Visit to York Art Gallery – a more advanced poetry class that will use the art work to inspire you while you learn how to write using complex forms.

Saturday June 11th, 10am

Visit to Rowntree Park for a morning of drama culminating in a short performance. Open to amateurs and professionals alike!

Saturday July 9th

Visit to the Minster Gardens for an end of year celebration in the form of a miniature lit-fest. Bring an extract of your favourite piece of literature to read. There will be cake…

Meeting a York poet

Wandering through town the other day I was surprised and delighted to see a man sitting behind an old fashioned typewriter and a sign declaring, ‘POEMS on (almost) anyone or anything’. Of course I couldn’t resist going and talking to him!

He told me that he writes the poems requested and then people can pay as much as they like for them. I (rather rudely) asked him if he makes money as a poet and he said he does, which I thought was pretty impressive because I think I remember reading once that even the most popular modern poets only sell a couple of thousand copies of each of their books. At any rate, I asked him to write a poem on why poetry is important and about half an hour later I received this rather lovely little verse. (I paid him £5. Do you think that’s fair?)

Poetry is important, by Stefan Kielbasiewicz

Poetry is not important
because of Shakespeare
Eliot, or Frost, and not
everyone’s cup of tea
but important things
like engineering, medicine,
or programming aren’t either.
It’s not my place
to say whether it is important
or not, since that statement
like poetry itself, cannot
be true or false.
If it’s important, it’s because
it involves people from all over
the world, and lets them say
what they mean and feel
in a different way,
and nothing could be more important
than having that possibility.

So there we go. This is for all my students who’ve ever asked, ‘but what’s the point of poetry?’ I hope you like it as much as I do!

Do go and find him – he was on Parliament Street last week though I don’t know if he’s always there. And buy a poem!

He’s on Facebook at this link, or you can search streetpoetryyork (with no spaces, just like that) to find him.

English ‘tuition’ in and around the sights of York

Should you, and how can you, tutor your children during the school holidays? Of course there’s no right answer to this – many students (and their parents) would be horrified at the thought while many others find it helpful not to lose momentum. The summer holiday in particular is long and, as is oft stated in the papers come the Autumn, a time when many children get out of the habit of thinking analytically or of concentrating for any significant length of time. One way you can approach the issue is to increase the family’s focus on educational trips and activities, either alongside your regular English tuition or while having a break from it. (You don’t have to present these as work of course – it’s much nicer to just have a lovely family day out with some interesting things to look at and talk about thrown in there!) One of the wonderful things about living in a city like York is that we are spoilt for choice when it comes to things to do with our families – and many of those things are brilliantly and subtly educational! Here are three of my favourite things to do in York to which most children and teenagers shouldn’t object too much…(and if they do, bribe them with cake at Coffee Culture on Goodramgate afterwards.)

1. rackham-tree+girl If you’re interested in books as physical objects as well as vessels for words, The Minster Gate Bookshop is pretty much heaven in rickety, shelf lined form. It has Bibles bigger than your average 6 year old, first editions, beautiful children’s books and enough literature for the whole family to get lost in for a good hour. It also has fantastic old maps and prints. My daughter is collecting Arthur Rackham prints that provide lots of good opportunities to inspire dressing up adventures and stories about the characters and that will one day be an introduction to some classic literature.

2. This really goes without saying, but York Minster has a wealth of incredible things to look at and discuss – from the stone kings to the stained glass, the crypt and the library, all in addition to the sheer magnificence, beauty and size of the building itself. 400 year old Bibles you have to don gloves to handle? A great introduction to a discussion about the power of language through the centuries. The kings tie in nicely with york-minster-1 Shakespeare’s Histories (spot the relevant ones) and the crypt’s archaeological and historical lessons could provide a fascinating opening for someone interested in the Anglo Saxons. There’s been a church on that spot since 627AD after all!

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Jeremy Irons, 1981 Mini-Series

3. OK, so this one isn’t quite in York, but it’s close enough. Castle Howard is, in my humble opinion, one of the very best stately homes in the country, if not the best. It is stunningly beautiful, enormous enough that you can easily spend a whole day exploring, has gardens and horizons you couldn’t ever get bored of and, of course, an absolutely fascinating history. In fact it seems almost flippant to say that one of my favourite reasons to visit is because I can wander around the grounds pretending to be in Brideshead Revisited, given the history of the Howard family, but I confess my obsession with Evelyn Waugh overwhelms even my love of John Vanbrugh and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. It is worth many day trips for the cafe and garden centre alone but the best way to see it is from a picnic rug, next to the fountain, with a copy of Brideshead in one hand and a croquet mallet in the other. All teenagers should read this book.

So there we go. Fairy tales, Bibles, Anglo Saxons, Shakespeare and Waugh, all barely a stone’s throw from a slice of cake or a brownie in the city centre – and these are just three of the hundreds of places your children could get some ‘English tutoring’ in York this summer. And if they’d like to come and see me so I can share some of the excitement with them, that’s brilliant too.

How I became an English tutor in York

I’m one of those people who was always going to be a teacher. Just on my mother’s side of the family alone, my mother works in higher education, my aunt is a primary school teacher and my grandmother taught EAL. When I did ‘what should I be when I grow up?’ tests, the answer was always teacher. If you’d asked me when I was 16, I’d have turned my nose up and told you I was going to be a writer, a lawyer or a vet, depending on the week, but in my heart of hearts I think I always knew.

Teaching English is brilliant for two reasons: I get to talk about books and I get to talk to teenagers who, in almost all cases, are funny, brilliant people. Put simply, books make me happy and teenagers make me smile. The combination is exhilarating.

When I moved to York it was for university. Like lots of York graduates I then decided to stay, because, well, why wouldn’t you? York and North Yorkshire are beautiful. I may not officially be a northerner but this is definitely where I belong. I married my northern boyfriend and we settled in to our respective schools. (He was a History teacher for a while but now he does things with computers. Apparently this is also fun, but I suspect not as fun as tutoring English.) I loved teaching in schools with a passion – I loved boarding, I loved English, I loved Drama, I loved school plays, I loved being a form tutor, I loved UCAS (I know!), I loved my students, I loved my colleagues and I loved, loved, loved talking about books all day.

Bearing in mind how much I loved teaching in schools, it was a slow move to becoming a private tutor. I took on a couple of students to whom I was recommended by other teachers and gradually I decided that as a tutor I would be able to make more of a difference than I could as a school teacher. When tutoring English and Drama I and my students can achieve so much more in an hour than we can in a classroom environment. With no distractions, an hour of tuition can be like a week’s worth of classroom lessons; we can focus entirely and precisely on what that particular student needs and we can make enormous progress extremely quickly. This is brilliant for students who can suddenly see that they have ability they didn’t realise they had and can get an almost instant confidence boost. I can plan schemes of work but I’m also not tied to a school’s deadlines so if it becomes apparent that we really need to spend 20 minutes on structuring complex sentences right now, we can do it and the student can get immediate feedback. I can work really carefully with my students’ needs and, importantly, they can tell me exactly what they want without worrying that they’re taking up too much of my time or that I won’t have the spare hours to dedicate to helping them when they need it. They get an instant level up – and, in a way, so do I. I see that glow of confidence, that smile as a particular skill clicks into place, that laugh as a previously impenetrable text suddenly makes sense.

Teaching English and Drama in York was brilliant but tutoring English and Drama in York is even better because the same things are still true – York is beautiful, books make me happy and teenagers make me smile – and now, to top it all off, I get to teach every lesson with a freshly made cup of tea and a slice of Yorkshire parkin. It doesn’t get better than that.

‘When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.’

So said Voltaire, but while everyone likes to get value for money, our society does not always offer a level playing field in terms of education. One of the things that I’ve been painfully aware of since I began tutoring is that some of the people that need it, might not be able to afford it.

I firmly believe that an excellent education should be available to all and as such I’m pleased that I’m now able to offer discounted rates to those from low income families. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss this.

Favouritism

It’s no secret that teachers don’t have favourite pupils. It’s unprofessional, cruel to the other children in the class and generally not fair as, of course, all children have the right to be treated equally, But what I – and I suspect most teachers – do have, are pupils that stick in the memory, even ten or twenty years down the line.

In my first job I had a Theatre Studies class with one particular student who was so incredibly talented that he made me cry during his examined performance. I taught a boy in an A level English class who used to bring me poems and bits of novels he was working on. I had a girl in one GCSE class who struggled a great deal but worked so hard that she got an A* through sheer force of will – and she did AS English a year early, at the same time as her GCSEs, and got an A.

All of these pupils from ten years ago, and many from more recent schools that I’ve worked in, stand out for me from the hundreds – thousands? – that I’ve taught. But what I absolutely love about tutoring is that now, all my pupils are memorable, and for all the right reasons. Every tutee that I see is here because they want to learn. They want to improve. They’ve taken the brave step of acknowledging that they need help with some particular aspect of their learning – even if they’re not completely sure what that is and they need me to help them figure it out – and they’ve arrived, pen in hand, ready to go. Some of them are very shy, some are confident, some seem confident but are actually incredibly nervous. I’ve tutored pupils whom schools have refused to teach – who have all turned out, by the way, to be bright, sparky, impressive young people. I’ve tutored pupils with SEN who are floundering in classes of 30 at school, and who have sat with me, drunk copious amounts of tea, given it their all and done the unthinkable – passed a GCSE that ‘everybody’ said they would fail. I absolutely love tutoring because every student that comes through my door leaves again more confident and motivated, better equipped to face their difficulties and feeling ready for the next step. So no, I don’t have favourites. It wouldn’t be fair. They’re all brilliant and I remember them all with a fierce pride.

Haikus rise at dawn

Haikus rise at dawn haiku
through the dreamer’s protesting
yawns and make her sing.

Creative writing has long been part of the GCSE English syllabus in some form or another and some A level options allow students to write creatively too, but lots of adults shelve their creativity and inwardly decide that they weren’t ever very good anyway, so there’s no point in carrying on writing now they’ve got jobs and children and inlaws to contend with. If you, like me, have exercise books full of slightly angsty teenage poems tucked away in the attic, make some time to dust them off and start writing again – you may be surprised at what’s tucked away between their cardboard covers and within your mind!

What do you gain from writing creatively?

Peace and quiet to do it (tell the kids that Mummy’s got to do her homework)
An outlet for your feelings
An excuse to use beautiful stationery
Space to explore your imagination
A chance to question yourself about your ideas and emotions
A new way to look at yourself

Put simply, creative writing, even the most fantastical of it, in some way reflects life. Tell a story and you understand a little more of yourself and of the world around you. It’s worth investing in.

I’ll be running creative writing workshops for adults very soon – get in touch for more details.

When exams go wrong…

Sometimes, after months of hard work, hundreds of timed essays, a carefully planned revision timetable and more coffee than is good for you, it goes wrong anyway. The exam board suddenly changes the question style, or you sleep really badly the night before, or you’re ill, or you just panic – and it feels like the end of the world, because you put in all. that. work. for. nothing. Add in the pressure of having to get up tomorrow and do an entirely different exam, or, worse, college places hanging in the balance or university applications looming, and some students find themselves facing very real – and very upsetting – stress.

So what can you, the student, do about it? Nothing – and everything. Nothing, because what’s done is done. In that sense, you need to do your utmost to put it behind you as soon as possible because you don’t want the upset to affect tomorrow’s exam, or tonight’s revision for that matter. Shake it off, go for a run, play a computer game, have a long bath – do something that will take your mind off it for the next hour or so. Then put the offending books out of sight (but don’t bin them!), get the next lot out, and crack on.

(Parents often find that whatever they say in this situation is entirely wrong – however lovely you are about it, a very distressed student may well interpret your concern and care as an indication that either you didn’t think they were clever enough in the first place, or you don’t understand how upset they are, or why. They’ll realise you don’t mean any of these things eventually, but in the immediate aftermath, it may be best to offer hugs while they’re crying and to just listen to their fears with plenty of tea and cake on hand.)

And then, as I said, you can do everything. You can use this upset to fuel your determination to get through the rest of your exams. Once they’re over you can talk to your teachers and make a plan for next year – maybe a resit, maybe not. Maybe your coursework result will be enough to pull you through. Maybe your chosen university will accept you even if you drop a grade. Maybe an AS resit will be far easier by the time you’ve done a whole year of A2 work. There are lots of maybes out there, and they don’t involve punishing yourself. If you want to resit, great, do it with bells on! If you don’t, make a new plan.

Because here’s a secret. Exams are, really, totally, enormously important. While you’re doing them. Next year, this lot won’t matter so much. And the year after that, they’ll hardly matter at all. Your SATs are the most important exams you’ll ever do…until your GCSEs. And your degree is the most important qualification you’ll ever get…until you can write on your CV that you’ve got X years of experience in the job. There is ALWAYS a way forward. There is ALWAYS something new around the corner. There is ALWAYS a next stage. And yes, right now, your exams are important, and it would be foolish to say otherwise. But one day, a few maybes away, noone will give two hoots what you got in your A levels because they’ll be far more interested in you being able to explain an example of how you once overcame adversity, and they might even give you a job if they like your answer. Or, maybe, you’ll be the one conducting the interview. Maybe maybe maybe…

Revision Blues

So, how do you approach that enormous pile of files and books? Put them under your pillow and hope the information magically gets into your brain while you dream? It’s one approach, but I can’t guarantee it’ll work… What I can guarantee though, is that starting is the hardest and most important bit. Here are some ideas on how to get going.

Make a plan. Work out how many days you have until the end of your exams, and then how many revision sessions you can do per day. If you’re on study leave then you can probably do 2 sessions in the morning and 2 in the afternoon. You might want to do some evening sessions too. Keep your sessions fairly short – an hour to an hour and a half is fine, depending on your age and attention span.
Get a big bit of paper and draw a calendar on it, showing each of those days and sessions. Write your exams on it.
Go through each of your subject files and write a list of all the topics you need to revise.
Work backwards from your exams and put your topics into your calendar. Use a pencil as you’ll need to rearrange them while you work this out!
Remember that one session per topic is probably not enough. Plan in second sessions to go back over your notes and consolidate your learning. Also plan in sessions where you can do timed past papers and essay questions.
You might not stick to this calendar rigidly, but if it’s there, prominently on your wall, it should help you keep focused on all the things you need to do.

Next, decide your approach for each subject. Get organised – you need a file where you can find things quickly and easily. In English you might need time to do any or all of the following:

Re-read your texts
Learn quotations
Study the mark scheme
Read exemplar essays
Read through your own old essays and preps
Read past examiners’ reports
Plan essays using the mark scheme to help
Write essays
Write essays in timed conditions

How do you learn quotations? Some people find this really easy and others find it awful. If you’re in the latter camp, try and integrate it into your everyday life. For each theme or character you need a sheet of plain A4. Write the name of the character or theme in the middle and circle it, then go through the text and pick out the main, appropriate quotations. Write them around the page in different colours so they stand out. Once you’ve done this for the whole text, wallpaper your bedroom. That way when you’re losing focus during your revision and you glance up to stare into space, you’ll find yourself staring at King Lear instead… Another good place to put them is in the bathroom. Nothing like staring at the loo door to help you learn quotations about philosophy and the meaning of life!

So how do you start revising? Make a plan and then…just start!

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