Have you ever heard of the Human Values Foundation? No, neither had I, but a friend of mine put my name forward to them, and they’ve commissioned me to write four short stories as part of what they do.
But what do they do?
This:
“Our vision is that young people among all sections of the community, both in the UK and also overseas, will imbibe and practise human values so as to become responsible, happy, fulfilled members of society and aspire to human excellence.”
Part of all that is providing resources and lessons plans that enable teachers to create work around those values.
The four topics I’ve been given are: Becoming Responsible, Contentment, Hope and Optimism, and Self-Sufficiency.
It’s been interesting writing them, and the results will be on the Human Values Foundation website in the near future.
This weekend has been a bitter-sweet affair. On Friday, I celebrated my 48th birthday. It was a beautiful evening spent with friends, slowly getting drunk, ruminating on life, love and loss and, as usual, talking bollocks – note to foreign readers, bollocks is British slang for testicles, but in this instance can be substituted for nonsense. We sampled a few of Birmingham’s finest drinking holes, made fun of each other, swapped news and decided to meet up again in the summer to really get to the heart of whatever shite it was we were talking about. One of my mates bought a copy of my book, Night Swimming, for me to sign, which was an unexpected pleasure, and as I was signing, he told me that my old English teacher, Mr Alsop, had died. This was a shock.
A few of us had stayed in touch with Mr Alsop. Some of the lads saw him around town, and one even joined in the weekly pub quiz that he ran. Most of my contact with him, apart from the occasional pint when I was in town, was through social media. Those of you who read this blog will know that I gave up Facebook just after Christmas. The giving up of Facebook has been a real liberation regarding work output and quality time and is something I would highly recommend. Well, I would recommend it as long as you stay in touch with people via other means. My blog posts and tweets still post through onto Facebook and, despite me announcing my leaving the site, my mates assumed I was still on it and knew that Mr Alsop was ill.
Alsop, as we called him, was a brilliant teacher. I went to a rough school. Learning wasn’t the top priority of most pupils or even teachers, and discipline could be tenuous at best in some lessons. An example I often use to illustrate how rough the school was, is the time a pupil brought in some live ammunition and threw it into the metalwork furnace – that was an interesting day. There are many others I could use. Some teachers had no control; their lessons were exercises in shouting and threats. Learning outcomes didn’t exist then, although I guess there must’ve been a plan of sorts – I seemed to spend a lot of time copying stuff off the board and staring out the window. But Alsop was different. He commanded the classroom with his physical presence, his love of his subject, English, and his scathing wit. No one pissed about in his lesson, and you learnt stuff. I remember, at the height of the miner’s strike in the 80’s, a load of us decided to go on strike and walked out of the school gates after break. We refused to go back into school and jeered at whichever teacher it was that tried to get us back in. Alsop walked out, said, ‘In’ and everyone shuffled in without a murmur – you didn’t mess with Mr Alsop.
He had a genuine love of literature, from Chaucer to John Cooper Clarke, Shakespeare to Douglas Adams, Thomas Hardy to Joe Strummer and everything in between. And his energy and enthusiasm were contagious. We were studying Evelyn Waugh’s, Men At Arms, and he delivered it with such insight and passion that I went on and read the other two books in the trilogy. I already had a love of reading before I met Mr Alsop, but he helped to focus it and showed all of us that words are important and that when they are combined in the right order, with the right intent, they can have a profound effect upon the reader. It only takes one bad teacher to put you off a subject for life. I was lucky; I had an excellent one.
I wanted to thank him for giving me, and all those he taught, such a rewarding time at school. For being so passionate about literature and creativity and for giving a shit. I mention him in the thanks section of, Night Swimming, but he died before he got a copy. I’m hoping to make his funeral in two weeks time. I know there will be lots of ex pupils there wanting to pay their respects. Here’s to you Mr Alsop, ‘So long and thanks for all the fish.’
What’s coming up on the writing workshop radar? Well, this.
Those crazy people at the Bournville Bookfest have only gone and asked me to run a comic book writing workshop as part of their programme for children with Special Needs!
From the Bookfest brochure.
The workshop is aimed at anyone who’s interested in making comics. I’ll be using the Comic Life app to show you how you can very quickly make slick looking comic strips. We’ll be focusing on the essentials: character, plot and dialogue. Everyone who attends will have the opportunity to develop a unique story and to produce a finished comic strip. We won’t worry about drawing ability or drawing full stop, if you’re not comfortable with that, as you can use anything you want to tell a story. (You can use photographs from your iPad or take pictures on the day.) The only boundaries will be your imagination!
Adventure Time meets the Avengers.
I’ve taught children with Special Needs for many years and have found that the visual, sequential nature of story telling used in comics is something that they easily relate to – just the same as mainstream kids – and that they can get a great deal of pleasure out of producing their own.
The workshop will be at Selly Oak Trust School on Saturday the 19th of March. There’s no recommended age for the workshop. We’ll leave it up to parents to judge for themselves, after all, no one knows your children better than you. All I would ask is that participants have an interest in comics and that they can tolerate me working with them. They will need some level of literacy – I’m not bothered about spelling – as they will be writing dialogue for their marvellous characters.
Finn and Jake in trouble again.
How do I book this great workshop? Scroll to the end and I’ll tell you.
The UK’s finest weekly comic.
Here are some examples of what you can do with the Comic Life app:
Booking for the workshop can be made by clicking here. The link will take you to the Bournville Bookfest booking page.
Michael Rosen, poet, writer and long time advocate for the arts in education, recently posted a wonderful piece on the Guardian website about how we teach the arts being just as important as the fact that we do teach it. Many of you out there that work in the arts and teach, already know how important that is, but I thought his ten key points to how that should be approached and why are so important that they’re well worth sharing again.
Michael Rosen is a children’s novelist and a former British Children’s Laureate Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Michael Rosen’s teaching of the arts checklist:
1) have a sense of ownership and control in the process;
2) have a sense of possibility, transformation and change – that the process is not closed with pre-planned outcomes;
3) feel safe in the process, and know that no matter what they do, they will not be exposed to ridicule, relentless testing, or the fear of being wrong;
4) feel the process can be individual, co-operative or both;
5) feel there is a flow between the arts, that they are not boxed off from each other;
6) feel they are working in an environment that welcomes their home cultures, backgrounds, heritages and languages;
7) feel that what they are making or doing matters – that the activity has status within the school and beyond;
8) be encouraged and enabled to find audiences for their work;
9) be exposed to the best practice and the best practitioners possible;
10) be encouraged to think of the arts as including or involving investigation, invention, discovery, play and co-operation and to think that these happen within the actual doing, but also in the talk, commentary and critical dialogue that goes on around the activity itself.
I’ve recently been involved with the wonderful Hearth organisation. Founded by Polly Wright, the artistic director, Hearth aims to use the arts to animate key issues in mental health, social care and the humanities, and to promote well-being. I’ve been enlisted, as part of the Writing Begets Writing initiative, to deliver a creative writing workshop in a mental health setting. I’ll be working alongside a mental health practitioner who will continue the work that I start, promoting creative writing as practice to promote well-being and who will encourage the service users to submit work to a short story anthology.
Fellow writers (left-right) Eugene Egan, Andy Cashmore and Vim Ayadurai
I’m really looking forward to working in this field as a writer. I have some experience of working with people who need mental health support but this will be the first time I’ve worked in this setting as a writer. The feedback from mental health service users regarding the benefits of creative writing were incredible.
You can find out more about this project and Hearth here.
On Tuesday, the 18th of February, 2014, I shall be working with young writers at Birmingham Museum’s Dollman Street Collection.
This is a warehouse full of items that the museum is unable to exhibit permanently; picture the huge warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones’ Raiders of the Lost Ark, now bring the scale down a tad and instead of sealed crates imagine engine parts, huge, ornate clock brackets, antique computers and old prototype cars that never saw production.
Giddy up
You get a very rough idea from these pictures of the type of thing you can elect to discover there.
This workshop is open to children aged 13-16 and will allow the children to explore this great space and then to handle objects from the collection.
I’ve been sent some pictures of the objects and they’re rather marvellous: kipper ties, weird hats, strange cats and other stuff I can’t identify. I’ll be putting the kids through a series of warm up exercises and focused tasks that lead up to them writing about the objects in no more than 140 characters (that includes spaces, punctuation etc.) just like a tweet, hence the title.
I’m really looking forward to this. I think it’s a great idea and will help them to think about editing and getting to the heart of writing: make every word count.
Here’s a rough outline for the session:
12.00 Arrive at MCC
12.15-12.30- Tour of the stores
12.30- 1.00- Lunch
1.00- 1.30- Introduction to the objects by a curator
1.30- 3.30- Facilitated session to create the interpretive material 4.00- Collection by parents
Here’s the brief:
Outline
This project will utilise the interpretation device of creating ‘Twitter Labels’. This means producing a piece of creative writing about an object using a max- imum of 140 characters, i.e. the method of delivery on the microblogging, so- cial media site ‘Twitter’. This challenging method of interpretation is inspired by modern tends in twitter story writing where authors are using a single tweet or series of tweets to tell a story. We would like the participants to create a story or piece of creative writing using an object as inspiration, in the format of a tweet. We are not looking for historical information about the object, i.e. its date, name etc. that information will also be displayed alongside.
Participants will be working with objects from the ‘Patterns and Textures’ sec- tion of the exhibition including examples of textile, glass, carved wood and more.
I’m not sure who you contact if you have a young one who’d be interested in this project but you could try Dollman Street, just click on this link for details Dollman Street.
Calling all teachers, yes you. Crawl out from beneath that mound of marking, take ten and read this post, you deserve it.
Those lovely people over at Writing West Midlands have recruited the novelist, Helen Cross, to deliver a course aimed at helping teachers to become writers. Helen is a novelist and all round creative whirlwind and just the kind of person you need to help you become a more accomplished writer for yourself and in school.
Check out the blurb below for more info:
In these six creative workshops novelist Helen Cross shares tips and techniques for improving teachers’ own creative writing and energising the subject in the classroom. Through a series of practical activities and discussions Helen’s workshops, which cover poetry, drama and prose, examine the core aspects of creative writing.
The course will be useful for teachers wishing to develop their own writing, and those looking for exciting ideas to share with Key Stage 1,2 and 3.
Key topics include:
creating believable characters with detailed identities and dramatic possibilities
techniques to sharpen and improve prose and poetic style
autobiographical writing and the importance of lived experience
engaging dialogue for stories and scripts
thinking empathetically about other people, real and imagined.
structuring, editing and shaping towards a final draft
Helen Cross is the author of three novels, including My Summer of Love, which became a BAFTA award-winning movie, and most recently Spilt Milk, Black Coffee, which she has recently adapted for the screen. She is an experienced tutor of creative writing in schools and universities both in the UK and abroad. She has worked with all the leading creative writing in education organisations including Write On! The British Council and The Arvon Foundation. She lectures in writing at Leeds Metropolitan University, and Birmingham City University where she is a Fellow of the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing.
