Today, 11th October, the first ever International Day of the Girl and the focus this year is on child marriage. I got to spend some of the day with Loreto Beaufort in Dublin with 100 First Years. What a treat that was. They were interested, asked loads of questions and were, one and all, perfectly charming and courteous.
A big thank you to the librarian Joan for organising this and I look forward to getting feedback from some of the girls who have read the book. It seems like a great school – in this week alone they have a focus on D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything and Read) time, on Harry Potter and the Loreto School in Rumbek Sudan.
First class of graduates at Rumbek
I know I have posted on this issue before, but it arose again for me last week.
I was in a lovely Primary School last week, Scoil Mhuire Tullow, a girl’s school with about two hundred pupils in it. I was there to talk to the Fifth and Sixth classes about The Butterfly Heart and to sit in on sessions that Lucinda Jacob was doing as part of their poetry week. This had been organised by the Writers in Schools programme which is run by Poetry Ireland.
What Lucinda did in her classes was interesting to me. She read out a few of her own poems, she encouraged children to read out poems they had written and she distributed a whole pile of poetry books for them to look through. The object of this was for them to choose a poem they liked and then take part in a mini Poetry Reading and come up and share this poem with the class. It was amazing to see the pupils diving into these books, sharing poems with one another, chatting and laughing about the poems and then proudly reading out the ones they had chosen. It was brilliant – and the poems they chose were wonderful; funny, happy, a little bit rude, sad and rhyming. One duo from one of the classes got up and performed a Rap poem they had written!
Surely surely that is what it should be about? I look at the agonies my own children go through in Secondary School as they are forced to read particular poets and then study them to death. I watch as what could be a natural love of poetry gets quickly stifled and smothered by what often appears to be poetry irrelevant to their own lives. I read their essays which examine, to a formula, what the poet was trying to say. I look on all this with despair.
One of the aims of an English syllabus has to be to generate a love of reading in all its form: poetry, prose, fiction, non fiction. Why, instead, does this torture have to be repeated year after year after year?
When my own children were at Primary School they had this wonderful thing called DEAR time – Drop Everything And Read. Reading as a treat, not reading as a chore. As a start why couldn’t this simple thing be introduced at Secondary School level?
