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...
It is day 2 of the “10 days of Language Paper 2” series, and I am slightly short on time today because I am about to run into a one-to-one lesson, but I still wanted to write something useful because this is one of the things students panic about most.
So, today, we are talking about the 19th-centu...
GUYS, IT IS TIME!!!! It is the day before Language Paper 2, and then you are DONE. Woop woop!
In 5 hours I have my Night Before Language Paper 2 class and I am VERY EXCITED for it. And so, I wrote this for you guys with some spare time I had before then.
So let’s talk about Question 5. It is 50% o...
I saw a thread on Reddit the other day that startled me a little. A Year 11 student was asking how to revise for English Language Paper 2, yet the exam is only days away. If that is you, and you genuinely have no idea where to begin, I wrote this for you. (P.S: Almost none of it involves rereading y...
