It’s a niche subject this week, but it is something that has been simmering away in my mind for a while.

When teaching English Literature, we naturally teach about the texts and develop the skills required in doing so.  When teaching English Language, we can choose the texts.  They don’t much matter as it is how they are written and how the student can understand, analyse, evaluate and compare them that counts.  Why then, do we offer the students such stultifyingly boring texts? So very often the subjects of the non-fiction extracts we see in past exam papers is so divorced from the lives the children lead.  It is actually pathetic to notice how the subjects are the concerns of a middle-aged middle-class audience.  Downsizing was a topic on a recent exam paper.  Which child has ever considered that as an idea?  We know that the examiner may be at that time of life where their children have left home and they are considering what the future holds, but how is this relevant for the average 16 year old?  One of the texts recommended for comparison in the exam board’s literature is about an old man remembering his youth and a woman whose mother has dementia.  Again, perfectly placed to interest me, a middle-aged woman, but of no interest at all to a teenager.

Why does this matter? Well, for the most able, it doesn’t.  To be able to write about any subject which is put in front of you, is a great skill and one which is worth learning.  To understand a topic, even though it is boring to you, or one you have never considered, that is also a skill you may well need in life.  But for those who struggle, these topics make an already challenging exam even more difficult.

We all know the difference it makes to a child who does not enjoy English if we change the topic to one they care about.  Read and write about rugby, or dancing, or fashion, or football – or whatever is your passion – and suddenly things don’t seem so daunting.  Suddenly, you’re in your own world with familiar ideas and vocabulary.  All at once, you are involved in something which means something to you. Recently I have encouraged a student who wanted to write a speech about how Mike Ashley is ruining Newcastle United and someone else wrote an email to Newcastle Falcons Rugby Club asking why they don’t spend more effort on encouraging girls’ rugby. Both students were engaged and interested in a way that they could not hope to be if the subject had been how to decorate the home or what kind of food you can cook on a budget.

Of course, everyone has different passions, and you can’t hope to please everyone. However, I’d like to suggest that some of these topics we see taught in school and we see on the exam papers themselves are deadly dull for nearly all students. They seem to be out of touch in a way which is staggering considering that we all work with young people.

I have been speaking mainly about the non-fiction extracts. It may seem harder to find subjects which interest young people amongst the musings of the nineteenth century classical writers. I’m not sure that’s true, though.  Literature speaks of universal ideas like death, love, danger, loss and pain. Teenagers may have limited experience of these things, but they have a more universal appeal than some of the appallingly tedious subjects that have cropped up in the non-fiction paper. But don’t get me started on the subjects they choose for the unseen poetry comparison  – Snails, cats and the weather – I mean, what were they thinking?