English
- Forthcoming Events
- Events
- Personnel
- Facilities and Resources
- Curriculum
- Extra-Curricular
- Photo Gallery
Forthcoming Events
7 -12 July Creative writing residential week at Ty Newydd, North Wales (16 students from Year 11 and 12). Led by poets John Hartley Williams and Vicki Feaver.
June-July Year 9 script and perform versions of Classical Greek tragedies in English, in a joint project with the Classics and Drama departments. Performance 10 July pm.
Monday 16 June: Speak Up! public speaking competition for all Year 8 girls.
Events
Antony and Cleopatra
The challenge of this production was to make the sprawling, complex and compulsive story of Antony and Cleopatra’s love manageable on stage for a female cast of Year 12 students. (That, and getting in the hall to rehearse). Most of the cast were studying the play as their Shakespeare set text for English Literature AS, but we were thrilled also to have girls who had stopped English after GCSE returning to get to grips with Shakespeare and sword fights. The set was dominated by two contrasting areas – the opulence of Egypt on the one hand, the severity of Rome on the other. Against this backdrop, there were memorable performances from the whole cast, but special mention must go to the two principals: Emma Trefethen as Antony and Eleanor Adams as Cleopatra. Photos from the dress rehearsal and performance by Colin Barlow and Jonathan Nicholl.
Shakespeare Youth Festival – Twelfth Night
A dedicated cast of Year 10 girls appeared in this student-directed performance of Twelfth Night as part of the Shakespeare Youth Festival at Headington Theatre on 2 and 3 February. The production was directed by the formidable team of Amy Clare-Wood and Jessie Anand (both Year 12), who auditioned, cast, directed and produced the whole piece with great aplomb and professionalism. Seeing a production through from start to finish was a great achievement, and they were rewarded with performances that showed sensitivity to the ideas of the play as well as an assured sense of comic timing.The photos by Mr Colin Barlow are taken from the dress rehearsal in school.
Hamlet
Year 13 English Lit. students put on Hamlet, one of their A-level set texts, in the hall in January. The production was brilliantly directed by Mari Girling, whose great visual sense helped to produce a startling and intimate performance space in which the claustrophobia of the court of Elsinore became fully palpable. There were great performances from all the cast, including Emily Bedford as Hamlet. A memorably terrifying Ghost, a towering ten feet of lugubrious papier-mâché and silk, now stands gargoyle-like in the English Dept corridor. The photos, by Jonathan Nicholl, are from the dress rehearsal.
The Duchess of Malfi
A small cast of sixth formers performed The Duchess of Malfi to a packed hall on November 9th. To get a sense of the intensity of the production and how it could move and terrify an audience have a look at these photos taken by Jonathan Nicholl.
Foyle Young Poets: OHS winners
We are delighted that Arabella Currie and Ivy Callaway have been selected from 10,000 entries in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award. On National Poetry Day (4 October) the girls travelled to the Unicorn Theatre in London to receive their prizes from the Foyle judges, Jo Shapcott and Daljit Nagra. Ari was among the top 15 winners and will be going back to The Hurst in Shropshire (where we took a group of students last June) for an Arvon writing course as her prize. Read their poems below.
My Hands
I exfoliate with sea salt
I moisturise in garlic
I rub raw pink chicken
smooth as a baby
and wet.
So I can smell
deep in my skin
all those meals that I’ve cooked.
Ginger mixed with onions
butter and cauliflower.
And sometimes
if the time is right
just inside my wrist
is salmon.
I’m proudest though of my left thumb
hard as a nut with its own grand canyon.
Here years of bluntly cutting cucumber have
given me my war wound
my armour plated thumb.
You my hands aren’t as soft as some
nor is your skin a pearly peach.
But with you in my kitchen
I can hold the whole world
and I can slice red pepper
at the speed
of light.
by Arabella Currie
You Used To Tell Me Stories
You were young.
Your father’s friend
entered your Nigerian home
in white linen.
Where are you going, you asked
‘To the house of God’
Will you see God, you asked
You were slapped.
At seven, sent to Eaton,
you wanted a mother.
After Oxford
you began to travel.
Having never stopped, You never stopped -
you and your partner
walked down
a Kenyan road
from church
My father cried.
He handed the phone to mother.
One, clean blow
to the skull. Robbers.
After your satchel.
Containing:
one disposable camera,
one notebook,
swimming trunks.
Your partner made the phone call.
Where are you now Stephen?
‘Seeing God, Ivy’
by Ivy Callaway
Personnel
We are a group of women teachers who enjoy working collectively but value our individuality highly.
Cathy O’Neill has led the department since 1992. She is proud of the imagination and energy of the teaching in the English department. She is beginning to develop her interest in Drama and directing. She now teaches Year 7 Drama, runs a lunchtime Drama club for Year 4 in the Junior Department and has directed The Duchess of Malfi for this year’s sixth form play. The students ensure that we never stand still and our daily conversations with each other mean that we rethink ideas and keep alert to other ways of doing things.
Julie Runacres is the powerhouse of the department. She is erudite, witty – even scurrilous – and full of the most brilliant teaching ideas. She runs the Creative Writing club for Years 8 to 11 and, this year, she and Cathy are co-ordinating a poetry writing residential course at Ty Newydd in North Wales for a group of girls from years 11 and 12. She is mentor for the Year 12 student directors of a Year 10 Twelfth Night as part of the Youth Festival in March 2008.
Rebecca Ekins is currently on maternity leave and we are all wildly excited by the birth of her baby son. In her absence, we welcome back Penny Cullerne Bown, who reprises her role as English-cum-ballet teacher and brings us grace and tranquillity. In addition, we’re delighted to have Sophie Hughes-Morgan and Ginnie Redston in the department. Sophie joins us from Headington and Ginnie from Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls’ School, Elstree, making her commute from the Cotswolds suddenly seem quite manageable. We are delighted to have their professionalism and upbeat good cheer within the department. They are getting to know their classes fast. Fran Townend is also bringing her cheerful energy from RS to teach Year 8.
Mari Girling is a whirlwind of invention. As editor of the magazine, she leads the committee and each year produces a yet more dynamic publication. She is a stained glass artist and a generator of community projects in East Oxford. She is directing Hamlet with Year 13 for a Christmas production.
Stephanie Masterson is new to the department. She has travelled widely and has taught at Didcot Girls’ School and St Mary’s Wantage. She has already begun to establish herself in the department and has brought a calm, efficient manner to her frantic colleagues. We are looking forward to working closely with her in the years ahead.
Facilities and Resources
The English department is housed in a new dedicated suite of rooms in the Mary Warnock School of Music. As you go into the building, the first thing you’ll notice is how light it all is: the windows open on to grass and trees - a favourite haunt of drama-focused lessons in the summer – and the glass panels that give on to the corridor mean that every lesson takes place with a sense of being part of the vibrant life of the whole Department. Girls may spill out of classrooms, books in hand, rehearsing their own performances of a scene from Shakespeare. Sixth formers cluster together round a large table, intent on their discussion of Milton, Chaucer or T. S. Eliot. All around them are samples of students’ work, from all year groups. No long-forgotten essays hastily pinned to notice boards here: our work celebrates the diversity of the girls’ experience in English, and you can expect to find stunning visual responses to literary texts; inventive creative writing; and astute and personal responses to both literary and non-fiction/media texts.
Each classroom has a computer with DVD, and TV with video-player. We are gradually acquiring projectors for all rooms and, while we wouldn’t claim to be at the cutting-edge of technology, we’re far from techno-phobic! We make use of the school’s ICT resources as required to support the girls’ writing and guide them in judicious and informed use of the Web to complement their research in the school library.
Curriculum
What we try to do is explore both classic and contemporary texts. We do not want our students to think that literature stopped in the middle of the twentieth century. Our reading lists, compiled by the students with our guidance, ensure that they can all keep pace with novels being written now. We are often impressed by how familiar our students are with books from all periods and genres. Encouraged by Elizabeth Sloan, the librarian, and their English teacher they might read the short listed Booker prize books or the Carnegie. Our annual Reading Week gives a sense of the importance of finding time for reading in a busy life.
Rather than giving you an exhaustive list of all we do in English it might help you to get a flavour of how we work in this subject by describing a series of lessons from various sections of the school. If you would like a detailed description of the curriculum, do email us and we can send it to you.
In Year 7, one class got an insight into the world of publishing through creating their own books for pre-school children. They researched ways in which existing picture books appeal to small children and created their own along similar lines. Forming into groups, they created their own publishing companies with logos and developed a range of marketing strategies. The unit culminated in a Book Fair in the classroom, and they hope to trial the books on pupils at the Junior Department soon.
In Year 9, a class began a unit of work on Satire by analysing covers of the satirical magazine Private Eye. They moved on to design their own covers, deciding on a contemporary news story and developing a satirical twist through their use of image and caption. They watched an episode of The Simpsons to consider satirical techniques of exaggeration, bathos, inversion and absurdity, and how humour is used in satire for a moral purpose. They looked at animation techniques before devising their own ideas for an animated satirical cartoon, drawing the stills for a 5 second sequence and animating them on computer. Finally, groups chose a single cartoon idea and wrote and recorded a 5 minute pilot episode to be aired on Open Evening.
GCSE students devise their own programme for
pre-school TV and film it.
At GCSE we have enjoyed venturing into new work with the study of Pinter, Beckett, Carver and the stories of Alice Munro for coursework. We have experimented with poetry comparison and engaged with Ibo culture and readings of Achebe in our study of his great novel, Things Fall Apart.
One GCSE class responded to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience by creating their own little books of Innocence and Experience with pictures, poems and annotation. Another class responded with collages, poems, music and paintings.
AS level students have studied Antony and Cleopatra, the poems of Byron and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture has been our coursework text. At A-level, we have enjoyed exploring twentieth-century Irish fiction for coursework, basing our work on three core texts: James Joyce’s Dubliners, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. Keith Hopper of Kellogg College, Oxford came in to talk to us about Joyce, O’Brien, and the Irish literary tradition. We are fortunate in having such brilliant lecturers on our doorstep in Oxford.
For our A-level Comparative and Contextual Study, we are returning to the poetry of the Romantic period, focusing on Keats’ Poems and Letters, but ranging widely in the canon and exploring some of the now lesser-known (and female!) writers popular at the time. Our study of the Romantics has always been enriched by a study weekend in the Lake District, in which we read – and write – poetry and prose intensively, while taking the walks up to Easedale Tarn so loved by William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and even going boating on Grasmere while reading The Prelude.
Extra-Curricular Activities and Achievements
An important part of the experience of English at Oxford High is what happens outside the classroom. Theatre trips are always being arranged: we went to the RSC productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Antony and Cleopatra. We run an English at University class for Year 13 students during the Autumn term to discuss texts beyond the syllabus.
We always welcome visitors to the department. We are particularly fortunate in the ways in which parents play such an active part in the life of English at OHS as visiting lecturers or just as friendly supporters of all our events. Come and see how English has changed since you were at school and yet how the pleasures of acting plays, saying poems aloud and arguing about texts remain the same.
Photo Gallery
Click on a photo to view it in a new window
 A tableau of court life in Hamlet |
 Margaret, Ursula and Hero set up the trap for Beatrice |
