The 13-14 year old kids piled in, silent, apprehensive, unsmiling. I'm used to silence in the classroom and to kids, but quickly realised that a pack of silent, apprehensive kids is a hard group to work with. How to break the ice next time?
The idea of them being there, away from the normal English class, was unsettling enough, so showing them a film of Professor Liz Aggiss' Motion Control was always going to put them on the back foot. Silence, apprehension and now Liz Aggiss. Conditions to explore confidence with written form? That's something to think about for next time.
I asked them to write their thoughts, stories, interpretations, whatever came into their heads after the first four minutes in which Liz, dressed in witchy green and heavy eye make-up challenges the camera in her bedroom as it invades her boudoir and records her ablutions. The students, confused and, I think, a little scared by the mad grown ups they had agreed to play with today, wrote their staccato prose rather than any outpouring of creativity. Captured by the crew, it was then taken away by me to read to the camera and the class, and then interpreted by the dancer in residence.
The layers of meaning she naturally put into the students' sentences obscured any clear message about the feel of a comma or full stop. It may have been memorable enough for them to learn new rules that would stay with them, but I think the more important lesson was that this is not the teaching tool in itself. Denotation, connotation and the role of the individual to imbue meaning - that's what we need to unwrap here. Is dance too subjective to ever convey something as precise as punctuation? Are we using something that is about improvisation to explain form? How can that ever work?
At this point, we were fishing in the deep, none of us knowing any more than anyone else, although everyone in the room expected me to have some kind of expertise. I remembered the advice of my PGCert tutor; research is not about proving the hypothesis. The deeper the dive, the better at this stage. Just remember to examine the fish.
Did they punctuate perfectly? Did they hell. Creative writing for them was about a 'blurt', as their deputy head told me later, although this wasn't the stream of consciousness that older, more confident people would pour onto the page at all. If they had been told to let it all flow, they wouldn't punctuate naturally, I was told by the deputy head.
There, that's a fish to look at; for me, the natural flow of ideas in creative writing is already imbued with form. The sentences may not even follow each other, but each will be perfectly punctuated. For me, and perhaps for my generation (another fish?), writing comes with commas, full stops and even semi colons, however random the writing.
What I want to see after we've found the tool to teach punctuation, is spontaneous writing that comes with the meaning and rhythm. I want to see what it takes to make punctuation as effortless as breathing. Breathe and the comma naturally falls onto the page. Finish the sentence and with it, the full stop drops like a stone. What is the feeling that makes the writer use a comma where a full stop should be?
Part of the problem this morning was the quality of the students. These were kids who already knew their way around a sentence. When they applied what our dancer had brought to the written word, how could I tell whether or not their perfectly formed sentences were influenced by what she had done or if they were just using their skills this time instead of lazily ignoring the rules they already knew?
Did we bring in the catch? No, not enough to provide a satisfying meal this time. But there were minnows, and sprats and perhaps enough bait to choose more specific waters next time. One of the cameramen works at a school for excluded children of all ages. Perhaps that's the choppier waters where I need to go fishing next time.
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