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23rd September 2016

Year 11 English Language homework booklet

Dear Parent/Carer,

During this week and next, all Year 11 students will be issued with the attached English Language

homework booklet to complete alongside the current English Literature Poetry Unit.

The booklet is thematically linked to the Love and Relationships Poetry Anthology and careful

completion of it will help to deepen their understanding of the themes within the poetry they are

studying in class. The booklet also aims to support development of their reading skills for the English

Language paper in which they have to respond to unseen non-fiction; it is essential that they are

regularly reading a broad range of fiction and non-fiction.

Students are expected to complete the tasks in order and have their booklets with them during

their Thursday English lesson to mark in class. Each week they will read an article and complete a

task; each task has been designed to develop a specific skill required for English Language Paper 2. In

addition to this homework which should take 45 minutes, pupils will also be set one other piece of

English homework related to the poems we are studying. Staff will expect to see the articles

annotated and a glossary of new vocabulary.

After half term students will be study A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and issued with another

English Language homework booklet to prepare them for Paper 1 (19th Century Fiction and

Imaginative Writing).

Yours faithfully

Becky Buckley

Second in English Department

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POETRY: LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS

ENGLISH LANGUAGE PAPER 2 HOMEWORK

PACK

This pack will support you with your work on Poetry and help prepare you for

your English Language Paper 2 exam.

The extracts selected will develop:

1. The skills needed to answer questions on unseen texts for English

Language Paper 2

2. Transactional writing skills for the writing task on English Language

Paper 2

3. Your comparisons of texts for both the English language Paper 2 exam

and the poetry exam

4. Your understanding of the presentation of themes and ideas in the

anthology poems

Complete the tasks in order – we will feedback on each task at the

beginning of every Thursday lesson. You will also have one other piece of

English homework a week based on the poems we are studying.

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ENGLISH LANGUAGE PAPER 2:ASSSSEMENT

OBJECTIVES

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WEEK 1: FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

TASK: READ THE ARTICLE BELOW AND COMPLETE QUESTIONS

This much I know about…Happiness

Posted on May 27, 2016by johntomsett

I have been a teacher for 27 years, a Headteacher for 12 years and, at the age of 51, this much I know about Happiness. Between patrolling the school corridors, ensuring Year 11 are still revising hard and checking the examination halls are in good order, I am writing my next book, This Much I Know About Mind Over Matter. Here is the biographical preface to a chapter onHappiness I wrote this evening. Happiness Make me happy, through the years, Never bring me, any tears, Let your arms be as warm as the sun from up above, Bring me fun, bring me sunshine, bring me love. Morecambe and Wise, Bring Me Sunshine As I write, it is a Friday evening at the beginning of the summer half-term holiday. Our eldest son rang from Durham an hour ago to tell us, against expectations, that his Reformation examination went ‘really well’. Our youngest is on the PS4 laughing with his mates. Louise, my wife, is relaxing in the bath. Marcus Rashford has scored for England after just two minutes in the last friendly before the European Football Championships. The weather is calm and sunny, my mate Tom has just texted me to arrange fishing for tomorrow afternoon, I have a good whisky to drink, bought for me by my colleagues Terry and Gail in an act of genuine kindness and I have several days ahead of me writing the final chapters of this book. I have good reason, surely, to be the happiest man on the planet. I have to admit, right now, at this precise moment, I do feel happy, without qualification. The factors contributing to this sense of contentment are not, however, of equal weighting. Louise luxuriates in a bath most Friday nights. I am never that worried about the football. I don’t need sunshine to make me smile. Fishing with Tom is always a pleasure, but we can go out on the river another day. A cup of Yorkshire tea will suffice if I am short of a decent whisky. Writing is a pleasure but can also be a pain. No, the main determinant of my happiness is the welfare of our boys. Joe’s satisfaction with his examination is significant. Like so many Freshers, his first year at university has had its challenges. In four days and two examinations’ time his summer holidays will begin and only then we will be able to look back on the past eight months and realise what a success they have been. As far as Olly goes, if he is getting on well with his mates, then we are all happy. The thing is, you can only be as happy as your unhappiest child. In the pantheon of populist philosophy, this aphorism ranks amongst the very best. Ultimately, children are the source of your greatest joy and your deepest sorrow. When Louise said I ought to buy a pregnancy tester when I was out procuring paint during the 1996 Easter holidays, her instruction hardly registered. I duly returned with my pot of yellow Dulux, but without the required test kit. Later that day I nipped to the chemist on the corner of our street. As the elderly sales woman handed me my change – I say elderly, looking back she was probably in her

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mid-fifties – she said, smilingly, ‘Good luck’. It took me half-way back to our house before I realised what she meant. After the purple stripes materialised on the plastic test strip to confirm Louise was pregnant, I looked in our bedroom mirror and said to myself, ‘From this point on you will always be worried and always be tired’. Never have I been more prescient. That insistent, gnawing worry inherent in being responsible for your children never wanes. When they are young their vulnerability is at least manageable. What you don’t realise is that you fret more when they get older because you have far less influence over their welfare. Their two year-old selves might well be wailing away, but you’ve got them strapped in a pram and under complete control. Quite rightly, as they grow up that level of control diminishes inexorably. The natural way of things dictates that by the time they are in their mid-teens your children begin the process of distancing themselves from you. I call it the child’s boomerang parabola. At around the age of thirteen you become unbearably embarrassing to them. At twenty they stop communicating with you completely. They come back to you in their mid-twenties, when they realise you were not so stupid after all. As a kid, winter Saturday evenings were the source of my greatest happiness. After an afternoon of breathless footie up the rec and tea and crumpets watching Frank Bough present Final Score, we would be scrubbed clean before settling down in the sitting room for an evening in front of the telly: Dr Who; Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game;Dixon of Doc Green; The Two Ronnies; Starsky and Hutch; Match of the Day. The BBC1 Saturday evening schedule in the 1970s is legendary. The spectacles I wear to view those evenings of vintage TV derive their rose colour not from the brilliance of Barker and Corbett, but from the comfort gained from having the whole family safe and together for a few precious hours. Seven of us crammed into the front room, craning for a good view of the screen, talking and laughing at the telly, generated genuine happiness. With the advent of multi-television set homes, tablets and i-Player, TV schedules are no longer the glue which holds the family together. In the BBC series, Back in Time for the Weekend, the Ashby-Hawkins family agreed to give up all their 21st-century technology and travel back in time to discover the radical transformation of our leisure time since 1950. In six episodes, they spent time living under the conditions typical of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. At the end of the series the mum said, ‘The Seventies was the perfect balance. It felt like a real golden era. What I’ve taken away from that is that it’s the time spent with people that is really important and making sure that we don’t let things like technology get in the way.’ What I felt as a child, snuggled in my pyjamas next to mother on the sofa, trying to recall all the items on Brucie’s Conveyor Belt, was a happiness borne of a sense of security. Everyone I loved in one room, safe and well. It could never last, of course, but for a few hours at the end of the week, we were happy. If we keep pursuing eternal happiness we will be perpetually disappointed. Phillip Larkin once made the astute observation that, ‘The more sensitive you are to suffering…the more accurate notion of life you have.’ Life is inevitably painful and once you realise that is the case, it is liberating; you can stop pursuing the unobtainable and begin enjoying your lot. Like this evening, which is now nearly done, happiness will always be transitory; understanding that

fact is crucial to our well-being. One May half-term, many years ago, I played football on a sunlit Gibraltan beach with Joe. It was breezy, the ball was too light but his small feet zipped across the beach effortlessly. At the end he fell down front-first in the sand and I captured his indefatigable spirit in this portrait. It was a moment in time. The transitory nature of things makes them essentially beautiful. As J.L. Carr wrote, It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

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TASKS:

1. Glossary – highlight any words you do not know and write out with definitions below:

2. What are the writer’s views on happiness? Use evidence to support your answers…

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WEEK 2: FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

TASK: Read the letter from John Steinbeck to his son (on page to 7) and complete the following

tasks:

1. What is the purpose of the letter?

2. What tone is created in the letter?

3. How does Steinbeck create this tone? Write one PEE paragraph (before you write your PEE

you need to annotate the letter – identifying language techniques and their effect).

AO2 Explain, comment on and analyse how writers use language and structure to achieve effects and influence readers, using relevant subject terminology to support their views.

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WEEK 3: LOVE LETTERS COMPARISON

This is a love letter from Winston Churchill to his wife written in 1935.

My darling Clemmie,

In your letter from Madras you wrote some words very dear to me, about my having enriched your life. I cannot tell you what pleasure this gave me, because I always feel so overwhelmingly in your debt, if there can be accounts in love…. What it has been to me to live all these years in your heart and companionship no phrases can convey.

Time passes swiftly, but is it not joyous to see how great and growing is the treasure we have gathered together, amid the storms and stresses of so many eventful and to millions tragic and terrible years?

Your loving husband

(Winston Churchill)

This is a love letter from singer Johnny Cash to his wife in 1994.

"Happy Birthday Princess,

We get old and get use to each other. We think alike.

We read each others minds. We know what the other wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted.

But once in awhile, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met. You still fascinate and inspire me.

You influence me for the better. You’re the object of my desire, the #1 Earthly reason for my existence. I love you very much.

Happy Birthday Princess.

John"

The pair married in 1968 and remained together for more than 30 years. June died in May 2003. Johnny Cash passed away just four months later.

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Read the letters and label and annotate any language features then complete the Venn Diagram

below…

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WEEK 4: PORPHYRIA’S LOVER REVIEW

An analytical review of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is a dramatic monologue written by the Victorian poet and playwright Robert Browning. The poem was first published in the January 1836 edition of ‘Monthly Repository’ under the title ‘Porphyria’, then published six years later in Robert Browning’s volume of ‘Dramatic Lyrics’ under the name ‘Madhouse cells’. The dramatic monologue did not receive its ultimate name until 1863. Browning is a highly skilled poet, recognisable for his experimental manipulation of rhyme scheme and syllabic metre. The depth of Browning’s work, especially his dramatic lyrics is admirable on a poetic, academic and psychological level. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, despite being Browning’s first dramatic monologue, stands as an ideal representative of the poet’s effective and successful use of a variety of poetic devices. Although there are many easily identifiable themes such as mental instability in the poem, little is known about Browning’s definite intentions. It is for this reason that many of the admirers of Browning’s work are so captivated with ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. Every aspect of the poem, from narrative content to poetic style is an extreme, and yet, despite the clarity and strength of the content there is still unsolved ambiguity about Browning’s purpose. If the poet’s other poems are anything to go by then ‘Porphyria’s Lover‘ most definitely had or has a purpose. One of the most striking aspects of ‘Porphyria’s Lover‘ for me is the contrast between Browning’s use of florid and romantic language when the poems speaker refers to things such as Porphyria’s ‘smiling rosy little head’ and the sinister, murderous events that are unfolding within the poem. The contrast seems to emphasises Browning’s desire to create extremities that would have horrified the Victorian audience that would have originally received the dramatic monologue. The most impressive aspect of this poem is undoubtedly Browning’s control of metre and rhyme scheme. The form of the dramatic monologue can be quite restrictive in the sense that the entire poem is built around one characters voice and therefore it is difficult to divide the poem into sections or stanzas without interrupting flow. Browning has worked around this, whilst still being faithful to the typical monologue structure. He has separated the poem into twelve section using the rhyme scheme. The rhyming structure consists of twelve lots of ABABB and each and every line within the poem is made up of eight syllables. The obsessive control of metre and rhyme within ‘Porphyria’s Lover‘ mirrors the calculated and psychopathic nature of the poem’s protagonist and speaker. As an avid reader of dramatic monologues and the work of Victorian poets, the sheer technical brilliance of this poem has completely captivated me to an obsessive level. The precision and control within the poem is startling; even Browning’s choice of the name ‘Porphyria’ could be subliminally delivering meaning. During one of my obsessive research sessions on this poem I found that the word ‘Porphyria’ is derived from a Latin word describing a rare purple mineral. Some readers believe that there are implications within the poem that the character ‘Porphyria’ was of a high or even royal social standing and the regal associations with the colour purple could potentially back that theory up. ‘Porphyria’ is also the categorical name for a group of disorders, included in which are diseases that during and prior to the Victorian era people believed were connected to ‘Vampirism’ and Hypertrichosis- crudely named the ‘Werewolf disease’. To me this poem is a work of art as much as it is an academic marvel, the brilliance of which eludes me as much as it mesmerises.

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TASKS:

1. List three things you find out about Browning as a poet

________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

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2. Evaluate how successfully the writer conveys their opinion of the poem Porphyria’s

Lover.

Point Evidence How this is successful

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WEEK 5: OPINIONS ON LOVE

Transactional writing task:

Write an article for a magazine explaining the importance of a good role model.

Consider

- What a role model is

- What qualities make them a good role model

- What you can learn from a role model

Remember to plan! Planning space