All things in moderation...revisited

2011 revisited

A colleague (I'll call her Angel) and I did some impromptu moderation of some Year 10 essays after school today, which I found incredibly valuable. 

It reminded me of a time in Ali bin Abi Taleb school (Al Foah) when I was a lead advisor there and met with the Arabic department to moderate a test. I learnt so much from those guys.

That post is here, and well worth my time revisiting it. Lovely to see those photos again too.

Te taura hāngai: Instead of changing you, we will change the assignment

One of my colleagues sent a link to Te Kahu Rolleston - a NZ writer/ poet/orator who 'mixes kapa haka with battle rap to get school kids hooked on language'.

I was taken with his story about having to memorise a passage from Macbeth when he was in Year 11 (Form 5): 

The fifth form arrived. We had an English teacher who was tasked with getting us to memorise a speech from Macbeth. It’s not much of an exaggeration when I tell you that this teacher’s job may as well have been to extract fish oil from mountain boulders. Since our third form year, our class had a reputation for burning through English teachers like a bonfire does kindling and twigs. One term, we had four English teachers. Some teachers stopped teaching our class. Others left the school completely after their time with us.

His school experience is not an unfamiliar one. I remember my classes during my fourth and fifth form years. Boys often nodded off under the influence, others were only interested in baiting teachers. Many were caned (the boys, not the teachers).

Te Kahu goes on to tell how one teacher made a breakthrough with him, by getting the students to translate the Shakespeare passage into their own language. Eureka.

The message is a great one - Te taura hāngai: Instead of changing you, we will change the assignment.

It's hard to make sentences too short (Seth Godin)

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

As usual, I'm reading two books at once. One is a non-fiction book by Ryan Holiday, the other is a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. I love them both but for different reasons.

Generally, Ryan uses shorter sentences than Penelope. She's a brilliant writer who packs a lot of brilliance into her sentences - so much so that I savor the words a lot more, whereas I savor the message more from Ryan.

Here's what I mean:

Ryan - Outward appearances are deceptive. What's within them, beneath them, is what matters.

Penelope - She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.

See what I mean? Both are examples of great short (ish) sentences, but different.

Seth Godin says:

The most direct way to improve your writing is to make your sentences shorter.

I was reading a magazine article yesterday and was rapidly losing interest. The topic appealed to me, but I couldn’t keep reading. Then I noticed that halfway through the first column, I was still on the same sentence.

We have trouble keeping that long a string in our heads at once.

You can make sentences too long.

But it’s hard to make them too short.