P.H.S. 2

The Croquet Lawn at Perrott Hill

Well, not much is happening in Bulgaria at the moment, so I am going to continue with my memories of Perrott Hill School in Somerset, my first teaching job.

September, 1982 was the beginning of my teaching career. Mrs Thatcher’s war in the Falklands was in full swing when I started my first term at P.H.S., a fairly small preparatory school in the South-West.

The English Room

 
For the benefit of my American readers, I ought to explain that an English prep school is rather different to its American namesake. The Brit version is for younger children, aged roughly 8 to 13. There were a few day girls at Perrott Hill, but the clientele was mostly male. One of the main purposes of a prep school is to prepare the children for their senior schools, mostly rather expensive public (i.e. private and fee-paying) schools. Canford, Bryanston and Kings’s Taunton are good “second-division” schools that received quite a few P.H.S. students and occasionally we might get one or two into Marlborough, Tonbridge and Eton. Intellectually-challenged students usually went to Allhallows.

Which brings us to the subject of Common Entrance. The Common Entrance (or C.E.) is not one examination. It is (or used to be) a whole raft of them: English (two papers), Mathematics (usually two papers, but sometimes three), Science (only one paper), History, Geography, French, Latin and Religious Studies (mostly the Bible). You sit the C.E. exams when you are about 13, although the girls often did a watered-down version at 11. The students’ answer papers would then be sent to the public schools, who would mark and grade them. About a week or so later, we would start to get the results. Strings of A or B grades meant that this or that candidate had been given a place at their future school, whereas D and E grades meant that he or she had better try elsewhere. Canny prep school heads soon worked out that the more popular senior schools would demand higher academic standards, so less able candidate would be guided towards schools that were not so demanding.

My new responsibilities as Head of English at Perrott Hill meant a lot of my time and effort were directed towards Common Entrance, but the good news was that really did not cramp my teaching style too much. Paper 1 was a comprehension exercise, while Paper 2 was the composition.

How do you teach comprehension? Well, the short answer is that you can’t. What you can do is encourage your students to read, read a bit more and read more widely. It also helps if the student’s written answers are expressed accurately and clearly. One way to do this is to give the students model answers, some of which are awful, some partly wrong (in a variety of different ways) and some which were spot on. The students always enjoyed pretending to be teachers and justifying the marks they had awarded to each answer.

My study / bedroom at P.H.S.

 
How do you teach composition? Well, there are the technical aspects, such as spelling and punctuation, and teaching them is not so challenging. It was only when I became a teacher that I began to get a real understanding of the use (and abuse) of apostrophes. Most adults (and many teachers) have only a partial and hazy grasp of those funny little squiggles. It is not a good idea to burden your students with too much grammatical terminology, but even quite young children can understand the differences between singular and plural, contractions and possessives.

 Composition (a poem, a description or a story) is also an art form, a creative work of the imagination, like composing a piece of music, making a sculpture or painting a picture. So can it be taught? Yes and no. What a good teacher can do is to try to get his or her students excited about the English language and all its possibilities. Reading to the class is not just a cop-out if you are giving the students an example, a model. Very often, one or two of your students will produce something that is worth reading to the rest of the class.