A Historian Reflects upon the Christmas Stories

In the middle decades of the Twentieth Century there was a lot of time devoted to arguments between science and religion. They were still going on when I was at school. Now it seems like a lot of time wasted. For it now seems obvious, to me at any rate, that there can be no conflict between good science and good religion because they deal with entirely different aspects of the human experience. They use different methods and ask entirely different questions. Many of my religious friends are eminent scientists and find this no problem at all. The problems start when attempts are made to use the approaches of religion to tackle scientific questions, and vice versa; but there is no requirement to do this.

What is not always so well understood is that exactly the same point applies to religion and history. The job of academic historians is to find and analyse evidence in an effort (doomed never to be unchallengeably successful) to find out exactly what was going on in the past. The job of history teachers like me is to try to communicate the findings of the scholars to the general public, especially to the young.

Where some religious people come unstuck, and many critics of religion, is they try to apply the methods and standards and questions of History as a discipline to religious stories.

Very few of the stories in the Bible (a great library of stories, poems, philosophy and so on) were produced by writers who had any intention of thinking or writing like modern historians. Every one knows that one of Jesus’s main teaching methods was to tell stories, and in this he was in a long tradition. The stories of Jonah, and of Job, for example, are as much stories as the story of the Good Samaritan and (at last I come to my main point) none the worse for it. For a story can contain as many truths, and matter for life-enhancing thought, as any piece of history.

“Othello” for example says a huge amount about the impact of jealousy on love. Young people probably get more truths, and ideas to discuss, about love and marriage and about the role of women in society from “Pride and Prejudice” than from any other single book. “Richard III”, as we all know, is not good history. But it contains all sorts of thought-provoking truths about the court as jungle.

And it is stories that are one of the main types of religious writing. The very earliest religion we know about consisted of human beings making up stories to try and explain the world and to tackle the big questions that the methods of science and history could not answer.

So, this Christmas, do not worry about whether there “really” were angels, or where the Wise Men “really” came from, or whether Mary “really” was a virgin. Listen to the stories, enjoy the stories and think about the stories. They are full of food for thought, and great truths.

Here are two that strike me.

Herod may or may not have ordered the Massacre of the Innocents exactly as described. But the story contains a great truth, which is that killing innocent people for the sake of public security is something that governments do. Sometimes it seems impossible to avoid it – consider the bombing of cities during the Second World War - but it is a terrible evil. Herod is not a comic pantomime villain, nor a one-off cruel king, but a character to provoke thought in all rulers who wield authority over security forces.

Then there are those intellectuals searching for God – the “Wise Men”. And where do they find God? In a new-born baby, child of refugees, in an out-house. As Evelyn Waugh, among others, has pointed out, the Magi arrived late, misunderstood what was going on and inadvertently provoked the Massacre of the Innocents. Plenty of great truths and life-enhancing reflection for all would-be intellectuals in that story.

"The Hammer and the Fire" - Review

“The Hammer and the Fire” by Henry Marsh 

Henry Marsh has just published his fifth major volume of poetry, “A Voyage to Babylon”. Its principal focus is on the Covenanters. His third volume, “The Guidman’s Daughter”, began with thinking about Mary Queen of Scots. I intend to review the new book – just published – in due course. But to whet your appetite I will post my reviews of Three and Four. The review of “The Guidman’s Daughter” is already on my blog. Here is my review of the fourth collection, “The Hammer and the Fire”.

John Knox is the subject of the opening section in Henry Marsh’s fourth collection of poems. The hammer and the fire of the title refer, in their first layer of meaning, to the hammers that smashed and the fires that consumed during the violent iconoclasm that accompanied Knox’s Reformation of the 1550s. (In the interest of balance it should be noted that similar “holy bonfires” also raged in Queen Elizabeth’s England, encouraged by the bishops, and that most of the image-breaking for which Oliver Cromwell has been blamed happened before he was born.) We feel the plight of the victims as

Grey friars wept in their sarks

their habits smouldering.

The adjectives of darkness applied to Knox accumulate in poem after poem: the black Knox; small, black-cloaked; with darkness wrapped about him; like a wet crow. In the very first poem in the book, “At the High Kirk, St Giles’” the contrast is made with

                        light streaming through the east windows.

                        A dawning that reminds us of the life of Christ.

Poem after poem also captures the violence of Knox’s language, sometimes direct quotation, sometimes refined by the poet’s imagination. But for Marsh we can be sure that the worst is not the abusive language but the narrow intolerance, the “scorching clarity” of a doctrine that leaves no room for mystery or ambiguity, or even for love.

But there is an honest and humane empathy with Knox as well. A different fire consumed his mentor, George Wishart, burnt for heresy; and slaving in a French galley was Not a time for subtlety. In the very short poem In Thrall a sort of kinship is admitted across the centuries:

                        This wrestling with a wraith.

                        I suspect, old fellow,

                        You’re cast in my own shadows.

And all the intense, highly pressurised contexts of Knox’s world are evoked in memorable grimness. Not really an excuse, but at least an explanation. Had things been different

                        Oh, you might have been

                        a son of the morning, were it not

                        for your justified heart. Driven

                        by the time’s plague – war of heresies.

There is a burning fire on the cover of the book – a photo of the Rosette Nebula. And this leads us on to a second theme of the book, the wonder of scientific discovery. In one of Knox’s debates with Queen Mary (and you may remember that Marsh’s previous volume, The Guidman’s Daughter focussed on her) we hear Renaissance curiosity dismissed:

                        Nicholas Copernicus, my erse.

But this collection goes on to celebrate the imaginative genius of Johannes Kepler. His mother was threatened with the agony of burning - rehearsal for Hell by a narrow-minded dogma that Knox would have enjoyed (albeit in a Catholic country). But Kepler had the openness of vision that moved mankind’s understanding of the universe forward.

                        Like magnetism, he thought,

                        the influence of sun and planet.

The contrast between the life-affirming, questing imagination of the scientist and the cold, restricted narrowness of the preacher is all too apparent.

Admirers of Marsh’s work have always loved his capacity to evoke in very few words the joy and wonder of the natural world. They will not be disappointed here. The poems on Kepler include reactions to the weird landforms of Iceland, where

                        Like infernal porridge pots, fumaroles

                        Slurp and burp.

Even greater pleasures are to be found once the focus moves to Darwin – another of Marsh’s heroes – for this in not the Darwin of voyages to the exotic Galapagos but the Darwin who both observed and loved the superficially “ordinary” life that teemed in his garden of Down House where there was

                        ivy stalking through stems of seeding

                        blue-bells, gathering for a leap

                        into a likely tree.

There follow a series of beautiful, heart warming poems to lift the spirit, as we see anew, through the precision of the poet’s vision and language, sundew, kestrels, spiders, daddy long-legs and many other creatures and plants.

Perhaps it arises from the influence of the harsh era of Knox, but I sense that the ruthlessness of nature is more readily apparent than in previous volumes, as foxes gnaw carrion, moles have poisonous bites and

                                                A heron shakes

                        its head in a bright rain

                        and

                              swallows. You watch

                        the slow

                                     slide

                                             down

                        the endless

                                          throat.

This last quotation also illustrates the occasional pleasure Marsh gives us by playing with the visual shape of the lines; never as a mere indulgence but to match his subject: the swirl of whirligig beetles, the flicker of reflections or the hammer-blows of Knox’s logic.

All through this collection we can hear the song of birds. There’s a sudden scraitch of gulls in Wishart’s ears as he is led to execution at St Andrews. Swifts scream when made homeless by the destruction of the abbeys. When Kepler’s mother outfaces her interrogators and emerges into the sun she hears sparrows are chirping. In Darwin’s garden fledgling Magpies squeal like damaged rabbits. In his Marsh’s own garden April shimmies through pollen and song.

In the final section of the book the poems become personal reflections, on private family moments but all with a universal application. Here is

                        The girl that I married now a woman

                        in a crowd.

This takes place at an Eco Demo, when Marsh, in a direct link to his objections to Knox, confesses that

                        Slogans make me bristle.

We also meet the man in the next bed in hospital

                        Worked thirty years as a miner,

                        smoked like a chimney. His lungs seemed

                        almost solid, his coughs heaving

in their Iron Maiden. I lay wincing,

dragged out of shallow dozes.

There are affectionate memories of loved ones now passed away –and again we hear the song of birds: the twitting flight of greenfinches or pewits tumbling in a wind. The birth of his youngest grandchild was also marked by a gust of jackdaws.

There are ninety-three poems in this collection, and the editor would not print my review if I referred to them all. If you have enjoyed Henry Marsh’s previous collection you will enjoy this one, and find greater depths as he tackles tougher themes and as the body of his work is enlarged. For those who come new to his writing, prepare to be transported by short, beautiful and neatly precise words to South Uist, to the lanes around Loanhead, to the life of verges and hedgerows, and to the harsh world of the old patriarch.

Many themes and images recur across the book, and more will be found as you track back and forth. For all the blinkered intolerance of Knox’s preaching, nevertheless he helped make Scotland what it has been

                        And Reid, Davy Hume –

                        the voyagers – set sail

from your Promised Land?

For all that, however, our eye is caught by the judgement of Bunty Wallace wi clorty wains:

                        Priest or meenister – wha

                        Gies a tinker’s curse?

If you know anyone who loves wild nature, or cares about Scotland’s complexities, or who wants to read some of the best of Scottish new writing, what better gift could there be?

Two stories for St Andrew’s Day

And they came to the teacher and said: “Master, why is the Patron Saint of Scotland Saint Andrew?” And he replied: “Listen carefully and you will learn.”

The First Story

Once upon a time there was a man called Regulus. He lived in the very centre of the civilised world, at a place called Patras in Greece. Patras was one of the busiest places in the Roman Empire, on the Gulf of Corinth. In 2006 Patras was European Capital of Culture.

Regulus one night had a dream. He dreamed that he was to dig up the bones of Saint Andrew, Jesus’ friend and companion, who had been buried in Patras, and take the bones to the end of the world.

Stealing some of the bones was the easy part. He got three fingers, an arm bone, one kneecap and one tooth. But where was the end of the world? He set off west through the Mediterranean. Then he left his ship and set off north across the Alps. But the world did not end. He was still in the Roman Empire. So he took another ship and let the wind blow him north and west some more. One night a great storm arose and dashed the ship against a hostile coast. Regulus staggered ashore, all wet, with his precious box of bones under his arm. He looked around him at the rocks and the sand and the grey mist. He saw strange folk with blue tattoos coming to greet him. They were friendly enough, and their king, Angus, let him have a cave to live in.

“Well”, he thought, “if this is not the end of the world it is close to it.” So he left Saint Andrew’s bones there and, long after Regulus died, the town became known as Saint Andrew’s.

The Second Story.

Once upon a time there was a tough warrior king in Scotland. He fought the Vikings in the north and beat them. He fought the Angles to the south and beat them too. All his enemies were slaughtered.

But this king was not happy. He felt that no one loved him. He felt that something was missing. So he called his chief spin-doctor, a learned monk, and asked his advice.

“Well,” said the monk. “What your country needs is a patron saint. Then you can have a flag that everyone will recognise, a direct link with the Bible, and an excuse for parties. Tourists will come in droves and help you spend your way out of the recession. And I can give you a bigger and better patron saint than the English have got. This will give you and your country what we call “the feel-good factor.”

“Go on,” said the king. “Tell me more.”

 “Well,” said the monk. “In my monastery we’ve got a box containing three fingers, and arm bone, one kneecap and a tooth. The legend is that they used to be bits of Saint Andrew. Why don’t I get some of the monks to write up this legend, embroider it a bit, make it into a beautifully illuminated manuscript, and you can give us money to build a really grand church to keep the bones in.”

The king was a great warrior, a decisive man. “Right!” he said. “Do it at once.” And so Saint Andrew became Patron Saint of Scotland and, of course, because he was one of Jesus’ disciples, he is a much bigger and more important saint than George or Patrick or David. So on Saint Andrew’s Day we have the biggest parties.

Epilogue

Then they said: “Master, you have muddled us. Which of these stories is true?” And he replied: “I shouldn’t worry about truth. Just do your best like Regulus did and enjoy the parties as the great king would have wished.”

A poet draws inspiration from Mary Queen of Scots

“The Guidman’s Daughter” by Henry Marsh

Henry Marsh has just published his fifth major volume of poetry, “A Voyage to Babylon”. Its principal focus is on the Covenanters. His fourth volume, “The Hammer and the Fire” began with thinking about John Knox. I intend to review the new book – just published. But to whet your appetite I will post my reviews of Three and Four.

This is a review of his third volume. His friends and former pupils will not be surprised to hear that he is now regarded - by better informed judges than me - as one of the leading poets writing in Scotland today. One of the things that make him so highly regarded is that his poems are accessible as well as moving. If you have never read a poem since you sat Higher English, this book might get you back into the habit.

The poems are organised into sections which reflect the various themes. His reactions to paintings form one section – Titian, Rembrandt, Hopper, Kym Needle, Renoir. The Titian under discussion is “The Virgin and Child with St John” - and a lamb.

           

            The scene is pastoral, seemingly tranquil

But then, sixteen lines later, comes the shock:

                                    It has no comfort for her.

            She knows that lambs are for slaughter

Through Henry’s eyes we become very aware of the artists, and the models, and the subjects, as human beings, caught up in the creative artifice of picture-making. Why on earth, for example, does Rembrandt put such heavy armour on a half-grown boy? We can enjoy the poems, and be led ourselves to look deeper into paintings when next we are in a gallery.

 

Another section is inspired by his beloved South Uist. It takes just a handful of words to create a special place.

            A sea, deep blue, cavorting,

            running south…..

or

                                    From a doubt

            of sea or cloud the Atlantic

            resolves to milky green

There is passion here for the sailing fulmars and clues of machair flowers. But there is also wry wit at the local games:

            Grim, they are, in their wee shelter

            on the machair – the pibroch judges

and the poet has an eye for twenty-first century marauders:

                                                They hurtle

            past in cars. Their lager cans

            lie buckled in a ditch.

I hope you can get a glimpse, in these few quoted lines, of the sharp eye, the well-tempered, finely chosen words, and the deep humanity of the vision.

Other sections deal with his family, private moments of love laid out for us to wonder at, to sense the loveliness, and to share. Those of you who know Jackie Marsh will at once recognise the lady in blue of the opening section (and the dedication), with her insistent goodness. I guess that most people’s favourite verses will be the ones arising out of moments with his grand-daughter; I defy anyone who has ever loved a lively infant to be unmoved by them. We hear of her instinctive shiver under a massive pine tree, and her rapture at Tinker Bell. And it is impossible to believe that the description of her meeting with a toad will not end up as an anthologised classic.

            “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Emily….”

            Solemnly she’s addressing a toad

            in her one morsel of French.

             

There are eight sections altogether. Poems are sparked off by tunes – “McPherson’s Rant” – by spiders in the bath, by a summer holiday in France:

            Depths of sunlight where an eye might

            drown, flow in the cobbled fissures

            between shops and medieval houses.

The discovery of some of his own discarded manuscript blown off the recycling lorry under a hedge transports us in the twist of a line to the pages torn from the Sybiline books. Infant Emily plucking her first apple needs no words to set us thinking of how vulnerable is Eden. A chance encounter on a train produces one of the more moving poems, and a memory of the boyhood destruction of a garden syringe (used as a rocket launcher) one of the funniest.

Section Eight is devoted to the “Guidman’s Daughter” of the title: Mary Queen of Scots; and the final group of poems are reflections on her extraordinary career. Poets need historians, if they are to write with meaning about past (and John Guy is acknowledged in the introduction) but historians need poets too, to make sure that the individual and the personal, the human moments, the absurdities and the stresses and the tragedies and the fatigue are not ignored amongst the statistics, nor forgotten in the generalisations, nor trampled beneath insensitive analysis. Henry Marsh’s Mary is always a woman – a school leaver taking on an impossible country, a lover taken in by the beautiful boy who turned out to be the drunken, poxy Darnley, a mother, separated from her child, a victim of violent and selfish men. The mystery of her relationship with Bothwell remains a mystery:

            What desperate loyalty tied her

            after brutal nights, the anguish that reached

            the Maries through the bristling dark?

Then she was the prisoner:

            A spirit,

            confined,

            is breaking her mind.

And finally condemned and executed:

            her dignity defiant, she wrested her meaning

            from a stubborn February dawn.

Superficially this is a book of three-score separate poems, each one a pleasure in its choice words, unexpected angles and precise observation. But the more they are read the more unifying themes emerge, and are brought together in Mary’s story.

                                    Was it just,

            in the end, she was a woman?

            You can see, any night, our

            crushing Scot’s brutalities,

            the blood and glass. And you hear

            the blast of that Trumpet – a woman’s

            rule is repugnant to nature,

            contrary to God. 

Poem after poem challenges – denies – the pessimism implicit in this question. Others deal with other subject matter altogether. But all the Scots who read this collection should not only have enjoyed a treat; they will also have been moved to think a little, laugh a little, ponder a little.

In defence of lecturing

There seems to be a campaign afoot on both sides of the Atlantic to blacken the reputation of the lecture as a method of teaching. Since I tweet under the name @historylecturer you will not be surprised to learn that I do not share this belief that lectures are inherently bad.

As a matter of fact when I was studying history at university I attended relatively few lectures in my first two years. I found that a ten-o’clock lecture was the enemy of study. One did not (as a student) get much done before ten, and then, with coffee afterwards, it was nearly time for lunch. I also discovered that many of the first-year lectures were not much different from chapters in text-books. My morning was far more productive if I got into a library by half-past nine, found a quiet corner and worked through till lunch. After lunch I might shift base to a different library. Looking back I think I got the balance slightly wrong; it would have been better to seek out a few of the really good lecture courses for the stimulation they offered. Doing my PGCE I attended a lot more lectures, some with profit, some without.

For there were some really good lectures, from which I gained a huge amount. I also discovered, as a class-room teacher, that lecturing – standing somewhere (not always at the front) – and telling the class things, was something I was quite good at. I have often had good reactions to my occasional public lectures and evening classes. I have heard some magnificent lectures in a whole range of venues. Taking all these experiences together I would argue that bad lectures are a waste of time and counter-productive, whereas good ones are an excellent part of an education.

So here are a few thoughts about the art of lecturing, what works and what doesn’t. I do not claim it is a comprehensive list.  Note well, though, that I am only talking about History Lectures. One of the more absurd phenomena in education is the attempt to make all disciplines the same.

1. Are you handing out a set of photocopied notes that covers what was in the lecture? If so, why bother to give the lecture? Why not just post the notes to students? If the notes are as good as possible, what else does the lecture add? If the notes are inadequate, why issue them?

2. Is all the information and explanations in the lecture clearly available to the pupils in the books that they can be reasonably expected to read for themselves? This applies at Primary 7, with chapters in children’s text-books. This applies at university. Obviously there is an important matter of judgment here.  What can your pupils be expected to read and understand for themselves? As far as class-room teaching is concerned, this varies from year to year. The good lecturer is flexible and responds to the needs of his audience.

3. “Death by Power-point” is no joke. It is awful. If the words on the slides are more or less the same as the words coming from the lecturer’s mouth, never go back to that class. I have more than once attended lectures (on teacher Inservice training days) where the lecturer actually read out their own power-point slides. I’ve been to very good Inservice lectures, too. In good lectures the spoken words and the slides complement and support each other. My own method (and I found Power-point a wonderful thing during those last few years of my career when it was available) was to have statistics, graphs, quotations and pictures appear on the screen that would have an impact on the audience. I might or might not refer to them directly. Thanks to modern technology one can almost as easily have snatches of music or clips of film appear (though do make sure you have checked out strange venues well in advance! The technology is certain not to work first time).

4. Do you merely read aloud a prepared text or do you speak more freely? If it is a prepared text we are back to point one. Why not simply post it out? But speaking freely allows for changes of pace, repetition where required, response to audience reaction and so on.

5. If the lecture is to some sort of examination class (adult evening classes for general education may be a bit different), is it structured in such a way that it is clear, and easy to take notes?

6. Is the lecture only one part of a programme of learning? Some adversarial writing on the subject seems to suggest that the alternatives are all lectures or no lectures. This is rubbish. Good lectures are integrated into a course and timed so as to fit with tutorials, seminars, research exercises, group-work, set reading, essays, making models out of cardboard (yes, I loved teaching Primary 7 as much as A-level) and so on.

So finally:

A good lecture is not merely a piece of writing read aloud. It is a performance art in which the sound of the lecturer’s voice, his body-language, and the visual materials used are part of the performance. The lecturer will use many rhetorical devices to enhance the performance, devices that are not available on the printed page. Because the spoken word is more ephemeral than the written, the lecturer can be bolder about throwing out ideas without a full apparatus of scholarship, and so challenge the listeners to think and debate. The good lecture will include time – not necessarily at the end – for questions and discussion, with an immediacy that is impossible in any other way. In a good lecture the lecturer will have some knowledge or expertise that the class does not have but which, by the end, they will have begun to share. In a good lecture all the members of the class will feel, up to a point, that the lecturer has been communicating with them personally.

Every teacher, at every level, should be self-critical at all times, and self-analytical. Keep an ear out for praise or criticism from pupils and be ready to adapt. Play to your strengths and use the teaching methods that you are good at. But if there are effective methods that do not come easily to you, do not cut them out of your lessons and do not go on doing them badly. Instead observe and listen to effective practitioners, go to training days – above all learn from your own mistakes.

My written pieces for Kindle, which I have called “Lectures” are not, of course, oral performances. Some of them are closely based on lectures I gave to senior pupils; others are not. I like to think that, as with good lectures, they can enable the interested party with a busy schedule to learn some new history fairly quickly, and be interested at the same time. They are listed here:

http://georgehharris.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/a-bibliographical-commercial-break.html

Some thoughts on bringing to life the Unification of Italy and of Germany in the Classroom

There was a tweet last night asking for advice on primary or secondary sources that could help bring to life the topics of the Unification of Italy and the Unification of Germany. Naturally, being a money-grubbing sort of fellow, I fired off links to my two Kindle pieces on the subject, and here they are:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007Z586XG/ref=s9_simh_gw_p351_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=11N88WSQ6ZWWN5JTXA92&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=430153987&pf_rd_i=468294

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unification-Italy-A-Grade-History-Lectures-ebook/dp/B007ZUDTN8/ref=pd_sim_kinc_3

However, I’m not sure they will bring a class-room to life in the way the tweeter intended. They were written originally to provide revision for able AS or Higher (Scotland) pupils who wanted to gee up their ideas and knowledge after they had mastered the text-book basics. Some kind friends tell me that they are also good as a rapid survey (they are short) for the interested general reader and as a first introduction for first-year university types. But they are at the tougher end of the spectrum for school-pupils though not, I hope, dull.

I taught these topics more or less every year of my career and experience did provide a few “enlivening” things that are worth sharing.

There was an excellent collection of primary sources on the period before 1848 when nationalism was getting a grip called “Metternich’s Europe” by Mack Walker. My copy, alas, fell to bits after 37 years and was binned when I retired. It is out of print, but here is the link to it on Amazon:

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Metternichs-Europe-Documents-MACK-WALKER/dp/B0015LXDDY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382527376&sr=1-1&keywords=Metternich%27s+Europe

My most used sources from this book were Heinrich von Gagern’s letter to his father explaining why he were German cloaks instead of French fashions, Metternich’s letter to Tsar Alexander I explaining why nationalism was so dangerous, and Cavour’s article in “Il Risorgimento” explaining that “the economic rebirth of a nation can never be separated from her political rebirth” (or vice versa). For Italy there is an excellent selection in Derek Beales “The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy”. Late in my career I discovered a collection of sources produced by the German Historical Institute that is just outstanding: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/home.cfm

For secondary sources one can look no further than “Europe reshaped” by JAS Grenville. Except that there is so much more good writing it seems a pity not to mention it. For Germany I recommend Fritz Stern: “Gold and Iron”, Golo Mann “The History of Germany since 1789” and David Blackbourn “Germany: The Long Nineteenth Century”. For Italy, anything by Denis Mack Smith. Much shorter and easier, and ideal for interested pupils, is “Europe: Vienna to Versailles” by LCB Seaman. None of these books is “worthy but dull.”

The most lively feature of the two stories is the intellectual and historical fascination, especially when placed in a long context, and I would introduce this early on in the course. For Germany the elephant in the room is, of course, Hitler. How did the most advanced new state in the world go so horribly wrong, and to what extent was it to do with the way Bismarck stitched together the German Empire. (I try to avoid the term “Unification of Germany” because that was the Bismarckian spin. He cut off Austria and Vienna. Bearing in mind that until 1918 there was a Saxon ambassador – well salaried – at the Prussian court, I see Bismarck’s Empire as a device to give tax-payers money to the Junkers.) but after 1989 there was another, jollier elephant in the room – the re-unification after the Cold War. I used to show video clips of (a) Germany wrecked in 1945 and (b) Germany rejoicing in 1989 and keep relating 19th century Nationalism to these.

Or the very long diplomatic context – going back to the ninth century – there is another Kindle piece by me about the Congress of Vienna: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Congress-Reassessed-A-grade-History-Lectures-ebook/dp/B009V3805E/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1382528602&sr=1-1&keywords=the+congress+of+vienna

As far as Italy is concerned the point is the great gulf between the official propaganda version of heroic nationalism sweeping the peninsular and the inevitable triumph of liberty, welcomed by all right-thinking people, and what actually happened. I would tell pupils early on about the Lega Nord, the modern Italian political party that wants to create Cavour’s vision of a modern, go-ahead state without the (as they see it) problems of the south. The propaganda version is well illustrated by the paintings of victor Emanuel in the Palazzo Publico in Siena. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=siena+palazzo+pubblico&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=47dnUtrhCYKK1AWQ6YHgDQ&sqi=2&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=929#facrc=_&imgdii=NnjzxGyus_0b7M%3A%3BnoR1ke85pDihFM%3BNnjzxGyus_0b7M%3A&imgrc=NnjzxGyus_0b7M%3A%3Bm_JsmMpPpueawM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fupload.wikimedia.org%252Fwikipedia%252Fcommons%252Fb%252Fbb%252FPalazzo_Pubblico_sala_del_risorgimento_1.JPG%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommons.wikimedia.org%252Fwiki%252FFile%253APalazzo_Pubblico_sala_del_risorgimento_1.JPG%3B1600%3B1200

Of course Italy has elephants in her room too.

The obvious physical thing to brighten lessons on this topic is maps. Show them that it is not only geographers who do colouring in. They will certainly be surprised to see how far east Bismarck’s Germany stretched.

I also used to brighten my lessons with music. For Italy there is the happy chance that Opera was one medium that could evade censorship, and so was used to spread nationalist messages. I was privileged to hear Verdi’s Chorus of Hebrew Slaves sung by Lithuanian Opera a few months after the Russians had left, and it moved me to tears. At Verdi’s funeral in Milan the vast crowd began spontaneously to sing it. In Austrian-controlled Venice opera goers would shout “Viva Verdi” meaning “Vittorio Emmanuele Re D’Italia” and there was not a lot the police could do. If Verdi is too cerebral for your class, hit them with the William Tell Overture – an opera in which the bad guys are Austrians oppressing the Swiss.

For Germany I twice managed to organise peculiarly jolly lessons. With the Head of German (who happened to be a musician) and the Headmaster (who happened to be a Germanist) and the Director of Music (ditto) I gathered round the piano with my pupils and we sang German student nationalist and drinking songs. If that is not possible for you to arrange, watch the moment in “Casablanca” where the German singing is drowned out by the Marseillaise. That’s a good example of the way German nationalism turned sour. “Die Wacht am Rein” started as a defensive song in the French War scare of 1840, and only became identified with aggression at a later date.

Not to mention Wagner.

What wonderful topics these are! How lucky you are if you are still being paid to talk about them.

A few thoughts on marking and work-loads

There is a bit of a buzz about marking and teachers’ work-loads going on at the moment. So here are a few thoughts of mine. I taught History for the whole of my career, with frequent forays into English, Modern Studies and Politics. I hope some of my anecdotal meanderings will help some hard-pressed NQT, or even cause some more senior practitioners to reconsider what they do - before, no doubt, deciding that what they do is best.

Work loads are very great, and I see no way round that. Fortunately I thought I had the best job in Scotland (sometimes) and was able to concentrate a very large proportion of my work on lesson preparation, which was always a stimulating challenge. A feature of my subjects, by the way, was that they were constantly changing (Politics most of all, of course) so that there was no question of merely using the old lessons on and on. Lesson preparation was always needed. Mind you with age and experience one could find and adapt old materials pretty rapidly; it was no longer the same effort in my fifties as it had been in my twenties. This was why I was able to direct a school play or musical fairly frequently. When I was younger I could mark or prepare into the small hours. As I got older and this became impossible I did school work early evening and both days of the weekend. But by then my children had grown up and so that was possible.

I never argued that the work-load justified the holidays. My line to friends who sneered enviously at my summer holidays was: “Well, I chose my profession with care. Didn’t you?” A good part of the summer was always spent doing serious reading, which is undoubtedly essential for teachers who aspire to give good value to the ablest pupils, though what counted as work and what counted as a pleasurable hobby is hard to define. If you don’t enjoy reading serious history books, don’t become a History teacher.

The only marking that I did not enjoy, and resented doing, was internal assessment towards final grades. The reason for this was because there seemed to be no educational value; it was too late. There could be no beneficial feed-back to pupils since this was their final mark for that component of the course. It also annoyed me that the exam boards brazenly passed over a large chunk of their marking to us, and did not pay us a bean. How much better the Scottish Qualifications Authority method, where the History coursework at Higher and Advanced Higher is externally marked.

[Pedant watch. I use History with a capital H for the school timetabled/examined subject and history with a small h for the study of the past. Sometimes the distinctions are blurred.]

Marking for exam-candidate pupils should always be related to the standards required in the exam. I suppose all teachers make a close study of the published marking criteria. Familiarise your pupils with these early on and make sure they take them into account as they write. Perhaps I was lucky that both SQA History and OCR History had well designed criteria. Some of the English, Modern Studies and Politics criteria struck me as less good: there might be vagueness, arbitrariness, box-ticking or rules that penalised the best for the sake of standardisation. If your exam board’s criteria are really poor, seek to change boards. Now that I am a tiny cog in the SQA machine I can see that examiners are responsive to pressure from teachers.

What I enjoyed about senior marking was setting up the dialogue with pupils that developed over the year, trying always to get them to think about what they wrote and how they wrote it. I did not usually put grades or marks on their work until relatively late in the course, though I might say things like “This would surely get a B mark from all but the meanest marker” or “This would probably be in the A/B area – safe A if the conclusion added a bit of value to what went before.” Otherwise comments were personal from me to the individual always, as I say, with an effort to get more thought, better methodology and better prose.

With pre-examination years (and I was lucky enough to teach P7 as well as S1 and S2) I made it clear from the start that one of our main aims was to develop writing skills (and thinking skills and reading skills; but they were rarely marked), and that they way to improve a skill was to practice. So they did a lot of writing. In fact my junior English classes would usually hand in some piece of writing, sometimes very brief, after every lesson (we also had quite a strong home-work regime: that’s for another blog-post). This did create a huge volume of stuff to get through, and I did, over a long career, try to work out ways of marking it effectively without the process detracting from other aspects of my work.

The first aim was to encourage them to go on and write more, preferably with purposeful optimism, next time. In extremis (I hope not too many former pupils are reading this) I might merely skim a routine piece of work in order to put a tick at the bottom and some such comment as “Well done to tackle this task so interestingly. Next time do try to stay more focused on the set title”. I was careful not to do this too often to the same class, but I found that getting work returned “by return of post” was so valuable that it was worth marking sketchily in order to achieve this.

When I made the time to mark junior work “properly” my most important principle was to include some praise and some suggestions for further improvement. In about 2006 we had visiting expert on a CPD In Service Day who encouraged us to mark with “Two stars and a wish”. I was able to glance smugly at the Deputy Head, because he knew this had been my strict departmental policy for over twenty years. (It was one of only two strict departmental policies I had. The other was that members of the History department were forbidden to teach boring lessons.) We had no marks, grades or orders. Many of our junior pupils produced work of outstanding quantity and quality for no other reward than a favourable comment, and pride in something well done.

Also, all our junior work was done in jotters, so that the dialogue with the pupil really could build up over the year. I could look back, and so could they. I might say: “If you look back five pages you will see I urged you to check the spellings of “parliament” and “government”. Why have you not done this?” also the nature of the comments would be tailored to the personality of the pupil. I remember one frail but muddled child whose page headed ”The Monk’s Day” was for some reason completely blank. I put “Not a very interesting day”. On the other hand later in the year, as one got to know the chancers, a comment might be: “Three lines in 20 mins is not acceptable. I know you can do more than this….. or else.”

I did make it a personal rule that I never assumed a child was being lazy until there was irrefutable evidence. I think this is really important. An able child who gets away with being lazy for a few weeks has suffered no serious educational damage. A child who has tried hard, but produced little, may be badly set back by harsh comments.

As for those important “nuts and bolts” of English, the trick is to get pupils to keep practising doing them better without causing those who find them hard (and it is rarely for want of trying) to think and write less, so as to make fewer mistakes. This is a matter for constant judgement in individual cases, and compromises.

Everything I have written here makes it sound as though all my marking was wonderful. It wasn’t. I had bad days like everyone else. Also my recent memories are of those relaxed days when I had been able to give up taking a games practice (Oh those hours spent umpiring the 3^rd XI on a Saturday!) and my children had left home for University. It was possible to take a stack of jotters to a café round the corner from the school and mark and doze in a comfy chair with a mug of double-shot latte and a chocolate slice. My more distant memories are of marking till 2 in the morning while rocking a cradle and after coming in tired from “coaching” thirty eleven year-olds how to pass a rugby ball. Happy days!