Category Archives: Uncategorized

Welcome to the weekend

Come Friday evening we’re usually pretty exhausted, and last week was no exception. Arthur and I had been booked up with play dates and activities every day – though we had lots of fun it maybe would have been sensible to leave us with a bit of breathing space. With my novel deadline fast approaching I was keen to get lots of writing done too, and of course that coincided with having lots of things I wanted to add to the blog!

By the time Leigh got home at about 6.30, tired and stressed by a long commute and an irritating encounter at work, we were very tempted to go to the pub. But instead we decided to go for a walk. Leigh put Arthur in the sling, and we set off up to Berry Head to catch the last of the evening light.

Arthur loves being carried by his dada, and the stresses of the week quickly melted away for Leigh: I think it would be nigh on impossible to stay stressed with the combination of fresh air, beautiful views and baby cuddles. They carried on their bonding when we got up to the fort, examining the world around them. As usual Arthur was thrilled to be outside.

I managed to get some mama cuddles too, though that did involve quite a bit of chasing. As Arthur gets faster we’ll definitely need to teach him about cliffs!

As the sun began to disappear and thoughts of dinner set in Leigh put Arthur back in the sling to head home. It was lovely to watch him snuggle up against his dada, him calmed and Leigh reinvigorated by our little adventure.

By the time we did get home Arthur had drifted off, so he even managed to fit in a power nap before we all sat down to dinner. It was the perfect start to the weekend, a weekend that turned out to be decidedly grey and drizzly – something that made me even more glad we’d made the most of that Friday sunshine!

Truth and modesty and self-publishing

10 Replies

Whenever I mention I’ve written a novel and am in the process of looking for a publisher people ask whether I’ve thought about doing it myself. My response is usually that I have – briefly – but I’m pretty sure it’s not for me.

I don’t mean to be disparaging of people who have chosen to go down the self-publishing route. I know that for many it has proven to be a great way of getting their work out there: for some it has even been extremely lucrative, or has opened the doors to traditional publishing houses. On one level, if I’m honest, I think I need the validation of a publisher in order to truly be able to consider myself an author. And I definitely don’t think I’m cut out for the ruthless self-promotion it would take to do it alone.

It’s not like Lili Badger has even been out there for that long. I’ve had some brilliant feedback, and although she hasn’t found a home quite yet I’m quietly confident that when the time is right she will. Until then I would rather focusing on writing than shift over to the role of publisher. It’s an area I know little about, and I’m busy enough right now not to need that extra dimension.

I’m not naive enough to think that there will be no self-promotion involved in getting published through a traditional route. Even just the business of establishing myself as someone who writes has pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone in my attempts to get an awareness of myself and my work out there through the incredible networks that exist in social media. But I think that, for now at least, it’s gone far enough.

I believe in my work, but that doesn’t mean I would have the barefaced confidence to sell it in the way I could something written by somebody else. However much I might quietly love Lili Badger and her world, however much I might quietly believe that it is a book that should be read by teenagers and adults alike, it’s not something I’d feel confident standing alone and shouting from the rooftops. But modesty has no place in marketing. And where self-promotion can come across as vanity or arrogance, it’s a completely different matter if your work is being praised and promoted by people who have built their careers around just that.

So for now I will focus on immersing myself in the world of my second novel – I’m so looking forward to reading it in its entirety once the first draft is finished, on moving into the next phase of editing and rewriting and honing those raw words into something polished and complete. I will also continue to enjoy building my blog, a place which is satisfying any urgent desire for readers I may have whilst at the same time mapping the new world I find myself in as a writer and a mother. And hopefully before too long all these worlds will start to come together and I will be writing of my explorations in the uncharted territory of being a newly published author.

I am not so modest that I believe that day will never come, but I am modest enough to know that I need the truth of my words to be validated before I am happy to release them. And that is why – for now at least – I know that self-publishing is not the road for me.

Thank you to Sara from Mum turned Mom for inspiring this post with this week’s prompt (‘Truth is more important than modesty’ Roald Dahl).

Silent Sunday: 6th April 2014

35 Replies

Word of the Week: Hiding

14 Replies

Today the word that sums up the week that was is:

Even just thinking about it now makes me giggle. It started in the kitchen, where Arthur often likes to wander around when I’m cooking or cleaning. He’d gone very quiet, and my heart leapt into my mouth – until I heard a squeak and found him squished in the corner by the dresser.

It happened again when we were up in the bathroom one morning getting ready for the day: we were both brushing our teeth, and I turned around to see him disappear into the cubby hole where the laundry lives looking very pleased with himself.

Then when we were in the park with friends he was all of a sudden nowhere to be seen. He’d found himself a quiet corner in the play house and was just hanging out, waiting to be found.

His favourite spot at the moment is under the stairs, and often when Leigh or I are panicking this is where he’ll be, tucked in between packs of nappies and his buggy.

It’s the glee on his face that gets me every time: he’s just so thrilled at having invented this new game. I’m not sure where he’s got it from as we hadn’t yet got round to playing hide and seek. I think part of it is just the particular comfort of being in a small space, but he’s definitely waiting for someone to find him too.

The game doesn’t always work out quite as planned. I had to rescue him when he managed to crawl under the sofa in my writing room when my focus was on the last few lines of a chapter.

And I think he’s chancing it a little to think we won’t notice when he slips behind the kitchen lamp.

But all in all this new game, and Arthur’s conscious sense of interactive play, has the potential to be lots and lots of fun. I’ll just have to hope he doesn’t get too creative in his hiding places!

Goodbye Jolly Babies

13 Replies

Today was an important day for Arthur as it marked his first graduation. After Easter we will be not be going back to Jolly Babies, the brilliant music group we’ve enjoyed since he was only twelve weeks old: instead he will be taking his place in Music with Mummy.

We’ve both really loved this group, held in the beautiful setting of Lupton House on the outskirts of Brixham. It was one of the very first groups we started going to regularly, and through it we have made some firm friends. It’s run by Carol, who with her boundless energy has seen me through many a sleep deprived haze. She manages to keep the atmosphere relaxed whilst still getting through lots of musical activities – no mean feat whilst juggling tiny babies, newly mobile toddlers and gossiping mums.

Together we’ve sung old favourites and learnt new songs, all with appropriate actions. Arthur’s favourite seems to be Wind the Bobbin Up – I’ll catch him randomly doing the arm movements around the house, and suspect they’ll be making their way into his disco dancing moves for years to come…

Through the classes Arthur has discovered a whole range of percussion instruments, which he is just beginning to progress from tasting to exploring in a more suitably rhythmic way. He saw his first bubbles there, and it’s always been a highlight when the bubble machine has come out at the end of each term.

Arthur first learnt to play ball through one of Carol’s songs too, and has really enjoyed the range of cuddly creatures she incorporates. In fact he’s developed a bit of a reputation as a bear thief…

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that bubble, ball and bear were amongst Arthur’s first words, but that’s not all he’s learnt. The classes have helped him become more confident, to enjoy mixing with other babies and their parents. And also to help to nurture a clear love of music that I feel sure will continue to grow.

Although our next class will still be with Carol, in the same building, and will reunite us with friends who have already graduated, a big part of me is sad to be leaving Jolly Babies behind. It’s been such a big part of Arthur’s development so far, and the fact we’re moving on just serves to remind me how crazily fast my baby is growing up! I’m sure Music with Mummy will be fab too though – look out for more updates when we’re settled.

Thank you to Carol for the pictures charting Arthur’s journey in Jolly Babies.

Why we need to lay off the tests and give our children space to learn

10 Replies

If this article had been published today, I would have had it pegged as an April fool. Testing and academic rigour for two year olds? Surely a predictably unfunny joke dreamt up by someone at the DfE to keep us on our toes. Sadly of course that is not the case. The letter that Wilshaw sent to Early Years inspectors was published on Friday, and it appears that he is deadly serious.

It comes as part of the latest onslaught on childhood and a meaningful education system which, if Gove et al get their way, will result in formal testing from age four, the reinstatement of national tests at seven, and the raising of the bar for schools as well as individual children in the year 6 SATs.

I am not an Early Years specialist: my expertise comes from ten years working in Secondary, and more recently as the mother of a fifteen month old. I do not intend to comment on Early Years provision, either current or proposed. What I do have an opinion on – and a strong one at that – is the damage that this regime of testing will cause.

Firstly, there is the stress and psychological pressure that comes with any test, however much its proponents try to play it down. Even if we are to consider the reception ‘check’ as a baseline assessment, nervous parents will no doubt want their offspring to do the best they can – and despair if they are found to be wanting. This nervousness and sense of expectation will naturally be passed on to the kids themselves. To be honest I’m having trouble marrying the idea of this as a baseline with the testing that will already have been going on for the previous two years: these tests will generate data, the data will have to be kept and compared, and suddenly the reception ‘check’ becomes a summative assessment of progress – at least for those children unlucky enough to have been in the system from the start.

Then of course there’s the question of what will be done with the data, how it will be applied to the provision of education for children in their primary years – a period when there will of course be regular high-stakes testing on the cards. The first and most obvious answer is that pupils will be set or streamed by ability. In fact in much of the comment I’ve read on this issue grouping by ability seems to be a given. And yet the research shows that this is damaging to pupil progress – particularly for the ‘less able’ pupils who this regime of testing is ostensibly meant to protect.

Children will be labelled, told what they are good at (perhaps) and where they are failing, and thus will begin the cycle of diminishing self-esteem that will serve to crush their potential.

There is also the question of what happens to the curriculum. With all the will in the world, when the stakes are high schools will teach to the test. Succeeding in the narrow framework the test defines is vital for the pupils and the teachers – far more immediately valuable than the pesky business of creating a lifelong love of learning. And what can be tested is necessarily narrow – it needs to be objective and quantifiable when so much of learning (especially for very young children) quite simply isn’t.

What happens to the space for children to play and explore and discover? What happens to the opportunities for them to surprise and delight with a fresh solution to a problem? What happens to the freedom for them to follow a spark of interest and have the satisfaction of finding something new? It strikes me as so spectacularly arrogant that this government can believe they know what is best for our children. My son amazes me every day: if I was focused on teaching him my truths there is so much I would miss, and so much of his potential that would go unrealised.

The irony of this all is that Wilshaw claims his goal is to prepare children for the demands of their education further down the line, and yet my experience of dealing with shell-shocked eleven year olds as they transitioned to secondary school taught me that testing does anything but. Though each cohort would come in with increasingly impressive KS2 scores, they would be broadly the same in terms of their actual ability. As an English teacher, much of year 7 was spent freeing them up to be creative again, to have their own thoughts, to realise that there was more to a good story than a range of connectives and lots of semi-colons. Some students were afraid to write anything at all for fear of not being able to spell correctly – and when they did they restricted their vocabulary in order to play it safe. Even by Wilshaw’s narrow view of the world, in order for students to have a hope of reaching the higher grades at GCSE they would need to be able to be perceptive, to offer original ideas and read between the lines, to take risks in their interpretations and in their own writing. And even to get that far they would need to have a sense of why they were doing it – the lure of yet another high-stakes test just isn’t going to cut it for most kids.

It is ultimately this goal of his that is the most telling thing of all. Education at any stage should be about preparing young people for the rest of their lives, not just the next phase of education.

In the early years it is not so much what children are learning that is the key, but who they are becoming: each experience lays down the very foundations of their personalities, shapes the people who they are going to be. By reducing this process to easily measurable goals that can be tested we will be doing our children a great disservice, and very possibly causing irrevocable damage that society will be left to fix for years to come.

Arthur’s castle

16 Replies

I have been well and truly spoilt this Mother’s Day. A lie in, a bath, delicious food, gorgeous flowers and some very sweet presents. We may have had words last year after Leigh underestimated how important this day would be to me as a new mum, but he’s well and truly outdone himself this time round. And in the midst of it all, we even had an adventure: we’ve driven past Berry Pomeroy castle countless times, but today we finally went to visit.

Arthur was totally in his element. The picture above shows him taking a break after chasing shadows and older boys around the ruins, pausing every so often to stroke the moss or post gravel through drains. We’d started our explorations in the woodland surrounding the castle itself: there was a particular tree that we passed as we meandered down the muddy path which Arthur was just mesmerised by

By the time we got back up to the castle, my mum and dad were waiting for us. It’s times like this that I’m very glad my parents are close by: I may have transitioned into the ‘mum’ role myself now but it still feels pretty important to hang out with my own mum on Mother’s Day. Arthur seemed to approve of our choice of companions too: once he’d spotted his Grampa and the woman who still has no name, Leigh and I hardly got a look in.

It was so much fun for us to explore somewhere new, and to watch Arthur enjoying a brand new environment with people who he has so clearly come to love and trust. I’ve always had a bit of a thing for ruins, and shadows, and dungeons, and contrasts – and today’s adventure offered those up in spades.

I’m very glad we finally ventured into our local castle: our trip has inspired us to plan visits to many more. There’s nothing quite like the history that is infused in the walls of a building, and though it may be many years before Arthur understands the significance of the stones he marvels over I think there’s an awful lot he can soak up from them in the mean time.

Silent Sunday: 30th March 2014

30 Replies

Love

26 Replies

It’s been a few weeks now since the anniversary of our first date, but I still can’t help but marvel at how much my life has changed since Leigh came back into it – something which was completely unexpected.

At the end of 2009 I was pulling myself back together after yet another failed relationship. I made some really bad decisions in my 20s – stayed with men for far too long who sapped my strength and identity, was terrified of being alone.

For a while I don’t think I was much fun to be around. I struggled with depression which whilst it was triggered by being treated really badly by two of those men in particular had its roots far deeper in a lingering feeling I had of just not quite being true to myself – and not even really knowing who that self was. All the while I was throwing myself into my career, getting real satisfaction from my work as a teacher with brilliant colleagues and fantastic family and friends. I had no real reason to be unhappy – and it was that I finally realised fully whilst walking in the snow in East London in the early hours of New Year’s Day. I needed to relish what I had, make the most of the opportunities I was being given, stop taking things – and people – for granted. My happiness was not going to come in the form of a man – or at least not until I had made peace with myself.

And then just as I was relishing the prospect of being happy on my own for the first time in my adult life, along came Leigh. We’d known each other for years – been part of a group of friends who all went clubbing together in our late teens and actually had our first kiss in a tent at Womad back in the nineties. We lost touch soon after that despite the fact we ended up at the same university, but when I joined Facebook he was the first person I looked up. There’d always been something about him that I was drawn to, but something always held me back from making proper contact with him.

We’ve talked about it since and he felt exactly the same way. We both seemed to think that we were out of each others’ league – watched each other from afar, with a strange sense of regret for a road not taken. Then one night in January 2010 Leigh made a comment on his Facebook page and, needing someone with whom to share my insomnia, I replied. I immediately switched my phone off once I had – it was such a tiny, insignificant thing, but for some reason it felt like I’d taken a massive step in reaching out to him and I was terrified in case he didn’t respond. But when I logged back onto Facebook in the morning it turned out he had, and that little comment sparked a flurry of online banter, our mutual friends amused at the public flirting we’d begun to engage in out of the blue.

A couple of weeks later I was throwing a party with my friend Sue. She thought I was bonkers, but I invited Leigh to come. He replied to my message straight away, saying that he would love to come but he was flying off to South Africa the next day for six weeks on a paramedic training course. This piqued my interest even more – I couldn’t quite picture the hedonistic public schoolboy I remembered as a paramedic.

Whilst he didn’t make the party, our communication had shifted from a public to a private forum, and over the six weeks he was away we exchanged increasingly long and intimate messages, catching up on all we’d missed over the more than a decade since we’d seen each other and falling a little bit more in love with each other every day. I was convinced it was the start of something, but Sue was understandably wary – she’d been there to pick up the pieces when things had gone wrong in the past, and she couldn’t quite condone me getting so caught up in a man I hadn’t even really met yet.

There was a particular week in February when we’d both gone to stay with another friend, Tsering, in Barcelona. They both teased me mercilessly about my pen pal, saying that I really shouldn’t get over excited as he would no doubt turn out to have a tail or at the very least extra toes. I, however, was undeterred. I knew it was crazy, but something about it all just felt so right. Leigh got back to London at the end of February, and our first date in the real world was on the first of March.

To say I was nervous would be a massive understatement, but as soon as we saw each other everything fell into place. The chemistry was just as strong in person as it had been through the thousands of words we’d exchanged online, and we had a brilliant night. We ended up going to a gig my brother Ben’s band just happened to be putting on round the corner, so he met my three brothers on that first date too – they gave him the seal of approval, and Leigh made a joke about the band playing at our wedding. Which, as it happened, they did.

He proposed a couple of months later, and we celebrated our engagement with a trip to Barcelona where Tsering got to vet him too – Sue had already given us her blessing (with a strongly worded warning to Leigh about what she’d do to him if he messed me around). I think they were both as relieved as I was that he had turned out to be amazing despite the unconventional way our relationship had started. There was no doubt that both Leigh and I were ready to settle down.

We got married the following summer in 2011, a year which was full of change for us both: Leigh won a place at medical school in Devon having decided to retrain to be a doctor, we found a house in Brixham in need of total renovation and moved in a couple of weeks before the wedding, then a couple of weeks after that I started my new job leading an English department in a school in Plymouth. Eighteen months later we finally finished the work on the house days before our son was born, and I have now taken a break from teaching to look after him and pursue the career as a writer I always dreamed of.

It makes me a bit dizzy to think about how different things are now than they were four years ago – how much we’ve achieved in such a short space of time. I finally feel like I can be happy in my skin, and much as I was ready for change that frosty January I don’t think I could have got here without Leigh, and love.

With thanks to Sara at Mum turned Mom for inspiring this post with her prompt: “That was unexpected…”

Why Gove getting down with the kids really gets my goat

1 Reply

Yesterday, despite the constant onslaught teachers are under at the moment and the disruption caused by Wednesday’s strike, teachers from 1000 schools nationwide found the time and energy to support over 30,000 students to take part in BBC School Report‘s News Day.

I love School Report. As an English and Media teacher, I was involved in it from its very early stages. It is a brilliant project to engage Key Stage Three pupils in the practical, hands-on application of the skills they’re learning, and from humble beginnings with a small group as an extra-curricular activity we built it into the year eight curriculum so that all students could benefit from what it had to offer. Through it, we were able to promote media literacy, creativity and current affairs. It encourages independent and collaborative learning, and provides the perfect opportunity for teachers to step back and act as facilitators rather than leading from the front. And this is where Gove’s involvement in yesterday’s News Day really winds me up.

These are all areas which, if Gove had his way, would be squeezed out of the diet we offer our young people in favour of more academic, traditional approaches to learning. And yet there he was, performing a ‘Wham’ rap and posing for a selfie to the bemusement and amusement of his audience of teenagers.

In 2008, I took a group of students to the Houses of Parliament to interview David Cameron, then leader of the opposition. Whatever my opinions of his politics, there was no doubt that he conducted himself appropriately: he was respectful and friendly as they took him to task over tuition fees, and politely declined to answer when the questions strayed into the personal. Unlike Gove, who ended up grinning like a goon as he tried to convince the kids that he was ok.

Quite aside from the fact that his mere involvement was astoundingly hypocritical given that his reforms stand to destroy everything which BBC School Report tries to promote, I can’t quite get over quite how insulting and disrespectful his behaviour was to hardworking teachers the day after tens of thousands of them were striking in protest against his decimation of the education system.

Because ultimately what this boils down to is propaganda – he was portraying himself as a man who just wants to have a laugh with young people and support their creative projects in schools when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. And the BBC – our supposedly impartial public service broadcaster – was doing everything it could to corroborate his story. The context of BBC School Report makes this even more galling: the learning materials accompanying the project emphasise the impartiality of the BBC, and there would have been a far larger audience than usual of impressionable young people to soak up the persona he was presenting.

There’s a darker side to this too: much as Gove was happy to expose the poor woman with whom he shared his first kiss to ridicule he clearly has no concern for the potential implications of sharing a selfie with a teenage girl. It seems that anyone in his path who might possibly help him advance his agenda is fair game.

I would like to think that teachers will be able to use Gove’s actions, and the subsequent coverage of them by the BBC, to illustrate the insidious way that propaganda works in our modern media machine, but I fear that with everything else going on they may not find the time.

But Gove, quite frankly, should be embarrassed. And the BBC should be hanging their heads in shame for such blatant manipulation of our young people at a time when their future has never looked so bleak.

	Governor’s Sch… on Word of the Week: Toddlin…
	sophieblovett on Raising revolutionaries
	Bob Abramms on Raising revolutionaries
	Comprehensive, creat… on Why private school’s not…
	Together we are stro… on How to grow a writer

Sophie is…

on a journey of (re)discovery in a brave new world.