There’s a fair chance of MR BIRLING coming up as the character question in this year’s Inspector Calls exams.
Now, GCSE students often use weak or overly simplistic words to describe Mr. Birling in An Inspector Calls. Here are some of the worst choices and better alternatives to use instead - IF he...
Dear gentle reader,
I know. You’ve been staring at the same Macbeth quotes since October. You’ve read “I have done the deed” so many times it has stopped meaning anything. And yet every time someone says “write about how Shakespeare presents ambition,” your mind goes completely blank.
Here’s what ...
Hi there,
Happy Friday and I hope you had an awesome week! If you’re in Year 11 (or you’re the parent of a Year 11 student!) you will know you’ve now got exactly 16 Days until the Literature Paper 1 exams.
That’s not very long and the last thing you want to do is waste your time on pointless tasks...
Of all the texts on the GCSE English Literature syllabus, A Christmas Carol is the one students tend to move through too quickly. It is usually because the plot feels familiar, almost predictable, which makes it easy to settle into retelling what happens rather than examining how Dickens is construc...
There is a temptation, when revising An Inspector Calls, to treat the play as a collection of character studies, Sheila’s redemption arc, Eric’s alcoholism, Birling’s pomposity, the Inspector’s theatrical exits. And those things matter. But they are, in the deepest sense, vehicles for something larg...
If you’re doing the Power & Conflict anthology for Literature Paper 2 (19 May), you’ll be asked to write about one poem you know and then compare it to another one you choose yourself. That second poem is where most students either win or lose marks, and it almost always comes down to comparison.
C...
With two days remaining, there is one form of revision that separates the students who perform from those who merely attend. Past paper practice.
Every additional hour spent rereading a text you are already familiar with yields diminishing returns at this stage. Your relationship with the novel or ...
There is a version of Macbeth revision that goes something like this: the witches are evil, they make Macbeth kill Duncan, and the supernatural represents the presence of evil in the play. That reading is accurate enough to recall in conversation, but it will earn you middling marks in an AQA exam, ...
I dedicate this to every student who has sat with a text they did not yet understand, wrestled with an argument that refused to yield, and returned, again and again, to the page: this letter is for you.
There is a principle that operates beneath all serious intellectual endeavour, one that is rarel...
Hi everyone,
If you only know me from Substack, it has been a while, and apologies for the silence. This term has been a heavy one but I am back, and back with something timely. AQA Language Paper 1 is at 9am on Thursday morning, and there is a little nugget I have been sharing with my students tha...
Yesterday’s post made the case for choosing the story question over the description. A number of you got in touch to say you had already committed to the story, or that the post had persuaded you to switch, and could I now explain how to write a good story. This is that post is for you.
A few thing...
The weather has been lovely recently, and because of that, I thought it would be lovely to do something useful in the lead-up to AQA Language Paper 2. For the next 10 days, I will be writing a short Substack post each day, taking you through some of the things students often misunderstand or lose ma...
