Grammar Gazette- Issue 1, 2018

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A FRENCHMAN, AN ENGLISHWOMAN, AND AN AMERICAN WALK INTO AN ESSAY . . .

Conversation is vital to English. I don’t only mean those between teacher and student, and student and student. I mean also that English—by studying texts that others have written and studied—allows us to get into conversations that span centuries, cultures and traditions. English is all about listening, considering, pulling apart and eventually making our own contributions. The fact that we might be listening to a 17th century poet rather than a 2018 politician is immaterial. We take in what is said, prise apart its workings, weigh it up and then respond to it. I am all too aware that quite often in adult conversations the responding regrettably happens before any of those other processes, but school is the place for lofty goals, even and especially if parliament and Twitter don’t live up to them. Let me show you what this conversational training looks like. In spatial terms, it looks like arriving at ‘my’ classroom to find that the Year 10 Literature girls have been having another ‘dinner table’ lesson, and have quite literally pushed the desks into a dining configuration to better facilitate their discussion of a meaty issue from Fahrenheit 451 . It also looks like my other classroom, the School’s main boardroom, where English Extension lessons have taken on a schmancy and vibrantly discursive flavour. The ‘Extensioners’ share the boardroom table not only with each other, but with literary and political theorists from the past two centuries. With a bit of practice, the girls learn to converse with the most significant thinkers of this and the past century: ‘Well I agree with you to a point,

AUTHOR Mr Stephen Woods Director of English

What better way, I thought to myself, to lead into an essay on the centrality of conversation to the learning and teaching of English, than to stage—via the twin magics of the Internet, and cut and paste— a conversation between three notables, talking in their own words about the importance of conversation: ‘The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation,’ intoned Michel de Montaigne with all the gravitas that having been a noted philosopher for four hundred years confers. Jane Austen registered her agreement by show-offily quoting from one of her own characters, ‘My idea of good company, [M. de Montaigne], is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company’. Having listened intently to his sage interlocutors, Truman Capote added sardonically, ‘That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet’.

GRAMMAR GAZETTE