Tag: GCSE

The Sea in ‘Hide and Seek’ by Vernon Scannell

I was covering this poem with my Y11 class this week when I finally came to some kind of understanding of the recurring sea imagery. I find it sometimes takes someone else talking about a text to give me focussed thinking space in order to consider these things; and, as the group were feeding back their analysis of the poem, I had one of those wonderful moments when I saw something that had previously eluded me.

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Lennie’s Death and the Death of the Dream

Lennie’s demise at the end of Of Mice and Men is the culmination of the deaths that Steinbeck has used throughout the text to convey the hopelessness of the world these characters inhabit. Yet Lennie’s death does not just represent the death of their dream; it has a much more significant and symbolic role in our understanding of ourselves.
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An Inspector Calls (BBC, 2015)

Having recorded Drama Republic‘s 2015 adaptation of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls when it aired on the BBC in September, I finally got around to watching it this Easter. Having been a set GCSE text since I started teaching, I am pretty familiar with the play. This production has a great number of strengths, though I must admit to having had somewhat mixed feelings by the time the credits rolled. Continue reading “An Inspector Calls (BBC, 2015)” →