NEAB Anthology

[enekron]

Geez, did any of you try and read some of that awful stuff called poetry in the NEAB Anthology for the English exams? :) Does me head in all that, I haven't a clue what it's on about :P

[neo hippy]

yup i did, sadly, its awfull most of it yeah. i really dont like ted hughes and almost all the "other culture" ones :)

[Albert The Destroyer]

Yes, got me a B which was nice, Seamus Heaney poems are good.

[AeroBob]

Interesting, though. All the 'poems about other cultures' are only about other cultures in so far as how they relate to our culture. :rolleyes:

GCSE poetry sucks. Unfortunately. And you've got to try and interpret meaningless nonsense into something profound and intelligent. Bleh.

[DCLXVI]

I've said this before and I'll say it again:

GCSE English Literature is supposed to encourage students to appreciate literature. What it does, however, is quite the opposite - it takes quality texts and rips them apart beyond all possibility of enjoyment by forcing students to attempt to extricate deep meaning from every page - which 90% of the time is an attempt to get blood from a turnip. Equally bad is when they force you to read crap poem after crap poem - presumably to make people think 'meh I could write better than that', and then go and write better than it thereby keeping them indoors not committing crimes.. but all it succeeds in doing is it makes the student at the end of their 2-year period think 'ok I am never going to read a book/poem again, ever'.

The exams, too, are stupid - inevitably they will ask the following:
a) A good question which takes far longer than the recommended 45 minutes to do justice to;
b) A stupid question, the meaning of which is impossible to discern and which therefore forces students to, in their answer, throw poo at the wall in the hope that some will stick;
c) A really stupid question that involves something like pretending to be a minor character from the book and writing a letter to an equally minor character expressing your views on jam, tea-towels, the king of Beirut, whatever may be vaguely applicable to a sub-plot of the story.

I fluffing hated every lesson of GCSE English. The ability to read and write is impossible to quantify; you can't expect to get a reliable estimate of a kid's literacy abilities by a standardised two-hour paper that in 99% of cases will be on a subject that the student simply could not give less of a rat's arse about.

For the record.. I haven't read a book since year 11, and I haven't read one of my own will since year 9. The education system clearly knows what it's doing..

[Albert The Destroyer]

I disagree, it did indeed open up a whole new depth to poetry to me and taught me of how to understand hidden meaning behind poems, thus enabling to truly appreciate good poetry by applying what I have been taught so I can understand texts. You may have a point, but it cuts both ways.

[dogsdinner]

Well, personally I agree with DCLXVI (although he is possibly evil). GCSE English, like many subjects, is horribly badly designed, and planned to remove every single bit of enjoyment from the lessons to turn it into a slog of meaning, depth and dullness.

Poetry and prose are there to be enjoyed. Why can't we enjoy them for what they are?

[Albert The Destroyer]

:laugh:, But yeah I suppose a lot has to with the teaching.