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English Teaching Online
The one with
all the SHORT
STORIES
Autumn (2)
2009 / Term 2
>> English Teaching
Online archive
>> Other Teachit
newsletters
A Writer's View | Jackie Kay
Podcasting with reluctant writers | Andrew
Buckton
Teaching reading skills using short stories |
Geoff Barton
Using short stories in the teaching of writing |
Phil Beadle
Critical analysis and takeaway learning parcels |
Moyra Beverton, NATE
Webwatch | Rhiannon Glover
Respond with a short story of your own | Harry
Dodds
The short story is neat, compact, focused.
In short, perfect for the classroom. This
issue's writers remind us that whether you
want to hone critical analysis skills or the
more mechanical aspects of reading, use
a short story (or 'takeaway learning
parcel') as stimulus for your own writing,
or read one as a palate cleanser for your
young writers, there's a story and task to
suit. In fact, I was so inspired by the articles in
this ETO that yesterday I went straight out
and bought two short story collections for
my very own. I'm already several stories in
and really enjoying rediscovering the joys
of this genre. This issue is timely too, as the the shortlist
for the BBC's National Short Story
competition was launched last week, and
(great news for all English teachers in
search of a free nugget of inspiration) the
finalists are available as podcasts for a
week. So there's really no excuse for not
exploring the very many delights of the
short story in your classroom right now!
What's your favourite short story?
Our writers discuss favourite short stories with
particular passion, namely:
Guy de Maupassant – 'The
Necklace'
Jack London – 'To Build A Fire'
Flannery O'Connor – 'A Good
Man is Hard to Find'
James Joyce – 'The Dead'
Roald Dahl – 'Twist in the Tale'
Ray Bradbury – 'The Veld' and
'The Playground'
William Sansom – ‘The Vertical
Ladder’
Doris Lessing – 'Through the
Tunnel'
Arthur Porges – ‘The Ruum’
Graham Greene – ‘The
Destructors’
Any story in Raymond Carver’s
What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love
Speaking with the Angel,
featuring a story by Nick Hornby
called ‘Nipple Jesus’
If you'd like to add your own small parcel of
perfection or simply read the recommendations
of colleagues, see the short stories thread in the
staffroom!
Siobhain Archer
www.teachit.co.uk
A Writer's View | Jackie Kay
The short story allows us in a short space of time to understand huge things, huge dilemmas. Short stories
pull us into their world and shake us up.
I am writing short stories again and they make me happier to write than anything. There is a great swirling
freedom in the short story. You have to hold your breath as you write one. You never know if you are
going to pull it off. Writing one story does not help you to write another. Each time, the form demands you
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find something new, something you have not found before.
It is a risky business, scary and thrilling, like climbing a mountain. It feels dangerous; it feels pioneering.
The short story is a glorious form that is evolving and changing before our very eyes; anything seems
possible. It is a difficult and challenging form. Short stories are not easy to write; they can't simply be
written as a preparation for writing a novel, or as a break from writing a novel. Some good novelists are
poor story writers.
What is a good short story exactly? It shares something with the novel in its use of the camera lens and
use of narrative voice. It shares something with poetry in its love of language, its economy, its use of
metaphor and voice. It is a lovely hybrid form, a cross between a poem and a novel. It catches people at
crucial moments of their lives and snaps them. The short story allows us in a short space of time to
understand huge things, huge dilemmas. Short stories pull us into their world and shake us up . They
don't hang about. They don't waste any time. They swoop down and get you like a sea gull diving down to
take the bread from your hand. They stay with you, the ones you love, forever.
I've never forgotten the shock of Guy de Maupassant's 'The Necklace' or Jack London's 'To Build A Fire', or
Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'. The way you just sit and stare at the pages, glaikit and
dumbstruck at the end of a good story. The way you want to begin it all over again. The empathy that
Joyce can make you feel in his masterpiece, 'The Dead'. That moment when The Lass of Aughrim is sung,
the moment that makes you feel you know the song. The lovely lyrical economy of a Carver story or a
Chekhov story. The short story never wastes a single word. A whole life can be transformed by witnessing
one kiss. ‘In short stories, it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because I don't know why!'
Chekhov in 1888 said. 'A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes
every word in the story to say what the meaning is.' Flannery O'Connor said.
A short story is a small moment of belief. Hard, uncompromising, often bleak, the story does not make
things easy for the reader. It is a tough form for tough times. If the novel sometimes spoon feeds the
reader, the short story asks her to feed herself. A story asks the reader to continue it after it has finished or
to begin it before it began. There is space for the reader to come in and imagine and create. There is
space for the reader to think for ages, to mull the impact of a story over, to try and recover from it! The short
story is such a perfect form, you should really be able to lift it up and carry it into a huge cornfield, and it
should still glow.
A reader can contain an entire story in her head and read a story in a single sitting. The story often makes
a reader aware of what she is not being told. What doesn't happen in a short story is as important as what
does. Like pauses in music; it is impossible to think about the short story without also thinking of its
mysterious silences.
Perhaps the thing I love about stories most is that they give the appearance of space of length, so that
when you return to them you are amazed at how the writer has created that effect. A whole life in a few
pages. Grace Paley has her character meet her ex husband on the library steps and the whole life unfolds
in just three pages. Annie Proulx takes us through an entire breathtaking and heartbreaking life love in
Broke back Mountain. Raymond Carver lets the objects of a failed marriage speak for themselves in 'Why
Don't You Dance'.
The short story is brilliant at taking the single emblematic moment that captures the whole, the dinner
party in 'Bliss' by Katharine Mansfield. The voice of the story catches the reader and claims her. A story
should stay with you long after you have put it down. A good story should change the way you see things,
the way you think. It should help you know yourself better. Every contemporary story writer I admire,
pushes the form still further, just when you thought there was nothing else to do: Ali Smith, James Kelman,
Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, T. Coraghessan Boyle … . It is an exciting time for the short story. It is the
perfect form for our times.
This article was originally written for the BBC National Short Story competition. This year’s shortlist was
announced on Friday:
Naomi Alderman – Other People’s Gods
Kate Clanchy – The Not­Dead and The Saved
Sara Maitland – Moss Witch
Jane Rogers ­ Hitting Trees with Sticks
Lionel Shriver – Exchange Rates
This year, for the first time, each story will be available as a free podcast available for download for two
weeks from Monday 30 November.
Teaching reading skills using short stories | Geoff Barton
The penny is beginning to drop that in secondary schools we too often 'do'
reading rather than 'teach' it. We can too easily assume that the mechanical
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bits – the actual teaching of reading skills – have been
Men have had
completed at primary school and therefore are off our
every advantage of
agenda. As Ofsted’s 2009 subject report (English at the
us in telling their
Crossroads) showed us, reading is something of a
own story.
concern in secondary schools. All teachers and the
Education has
librarian have responsibility for improving pupils’ reading
been theirs in so
ability, such as how they skim and scan texts, analyse
much higher a
themes and language, and how they undertake
degree; the pen
independent research. These are the important
has been in their
mechanics of reading. But as English teachers our responsibilities run deeper.
hands.
Many of us became English teachers because reading dominates our lives.
Jane Austen
We are often obsessive readers. Our job isn’t just about the skills – it’s about
the absolute necessity of reading of reading for pleasure. We love books. We
are text maniacs. Thus in teaching a short story we’re not only educating
youngsters a bout a particular place in a particular time, giving them insights into characters and
language, but we’re also teaching them how to read. And we owe it to our pupils to make sure they are
familiar with short stories because it’s a form of literature that is often ignored or misunderstood.
So here are my five hints for teaching short stories:
1. The brevity of short stories makes them convenient for classroom use: a group can
consume a whole story in one sitting and have time for discussion. But brevity is a small part
of the short story’s appeal. The best short stories in their understated sketching of character
and place can pack an extraordinary emotional punch, illuminating human nature with deft
restraint. Get pupils exploring this.
2. Do all those things that make reading active: get pupils thinking about the story’s themes
in advance and writing their own opening paragraph, or looking at a “not very good” opening
that you provide. Get them, in other words, to approach the story as a writer themselves.
They will engage more with the story if they have themselves already dabbled in its themes
and issues.
3. Don’t underestimate the power of reading aloud. The bleakest Wednesday afternoon can
be transformed by the magic woven by a good short story read by you. In doing so we
nourish children’s imagination, teach them about how effective readers read, and strengthen
their sense of the rhythms of English.
4.Get pupils exploring stories in groups, focusing on what happened, what we learn about
the characters, what we notice about language. Then explore how things might have
developed differently: what if…? Use hot­seating, interviews, drama before pupils write their
own response or a story continuation.
5.We understand short stories better when we read lots of them. This familiarises us with the
form. So don’t use a single story as a one­off. Teach it as part of an introduction to the history
of short stories, or develop a departmental anthology, contrasting those that go for structural
impact (the Roald Dahl “twist in the Tale”) with those that use character to illuminate human
dilemmas (eg Leslie Norris). Aim to deepen and broaden pupils’ knowledge of an important
literary tradition.
Most important of all, of course: enjoy!
Critical analysis and takeaway learning parcels | Moyra Beverton, NATE
I have a confession to make. I don’t actually like short stories that much. I know, I
should, they are very worthy literary works and very difficult to write well and so on but
I find them very frustrating. No sooner have you started reading than they finish;
they’re unsatisfying in that way and frankly, I’d rather read a full length novel.
There are though, some exceptions, particularly when I
want to share a wide variety of genres or styles of writing
with my students. In that respect I love short stories.
They’re so compact. You can read them effectively in less
than a lesson and share the quality of the writing through discussion or
pastiche; divide them up, write prequels and sequels and have no end of fun
with them. They’re like takeaway learning parcels.
We want a story
that starts out with
an earthquake and
works its way up to
a climax.
Samuel Goldwyn
For example, I’ve just been working with a couple of stories from The
Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. I had some staffing problems last year (who
doesn’t these days?), which meant that my current top set year nines did not have the best experience. To
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counteract this, we have been working doubly hard to develop their critical analysis. We first read ‘The
Veld’ from this collection and discussed how the writer must have imagined his automatic house was pure
fiction; which it was when he wrote it. The students picked up on how context, social and historical is so
important to the reader’s interpretation, particularly within the science fiction genre.
Later, we alighted on a particular section of the story where we noticed the writer using a plethora of ‘l’
sounds in a soothing way, to lull the reader whilst juxtaposing the threatening behaviour of the lions. We
experimented with replacing the ‘l’ words with alternative, harsher sounds, exploring whether this altered
the tone or not. (Very close reading there.) J
Another thing I really like about short stories is the way you have a complete structure to play with which
can be deconstructed quite simply and effectively. I tend to start with a simple, problem/conflict/resolution
deconstruction and then use this to build students’ analysis of the text. This helps to teach structuring of
their own efforts, by fostering their awareness of the writer at work.
When we then read a second story, ‘The Playground’ from the same collection, the students were able to
repeat the deconstruction themselves, noticing the similarities of the structure employed by the same
writer. They were able to see in a short space of time how a writer has a way of using language, structure
and form to suit their style, returning to their personal reading to apply their learning.
Their subsequent comparative essays were a delight to read and assess. They felt that they had learnt a
lot in a short space of time which was motivating for them and encouraging for me!
So ... although I may not personally turn to short stories for my own reading pleasure, I have to concede
that in my teaching I find them extremely useful in sharing the craft of writing. I can broaden the
experience of my students in a compact way which suits the sporadic nature of the secondary timetable
and meets the need for students to see a feasible outcome within a single lesson of sixty minutes.
Respond with a short story of your own | Harry Dodds
I find increasingly that, when I recall my childhood, the memories cast themselves into
near­perfect short stories. (I’d write them, but John Griffin has already done the job, in
an uncanny replication of my experience, in his collection Skulker Wheat). Anyway,
the point is that every one of my unfledged stories has a very precise, single focus – it
might be a character, a voice, an experience that gave insight or understanding – or
even complete bewilderment.
These qualities are what make short stories such good
classroom resources – simple, focused and essentially
catching just one thing; direct in expression, though sometimes very subtle.
They offer excellent opportunities for taking time out of the grind of APP and
analysis, and focusing on the pure enjoyment of narrative that writers intend
us to experience.
If you want a happy
ending, that
depends, of course,
on where you stop
your story.
Take, for example, William Sansom’s ‘The Vertical Ladder’. This is a complete
Orson Welles
winner, for almost any age. It deals with a very simple situation, set in a
network of relationships that any adolescent, male or female, will recognise
immediately, and its final impact rests on a betrayal of trust. It has a huge impact, every time, and the
moments of silence after you’ve read the last word offer all the assessment information you need to justify
having read it. To go from the reading into analysis would be both to diminish the story and to disrespect
it. It does its own job without help from anyone else, by showing rather than by telling. A good short story
is an opportunity to support reflection on experience, before it’s an object for study.
There are a handful of stories in the same league as ‘The Vertical Ladder’ – Doris Lessing’s ‘Through the
Tunnel’; Arthur Porges’ ‘The Ruum’; Graham Greene’s ‘The Destructors’ (and any number of others.)
How, though, can the responsible English teacher justify doing something purely for enjoyment, as if that
weren’t justification enough? I’d take Phyllis Webb’s advice: she said, ‘the proper response to a poem is
another poem’. One very proper response to a short story is another short story. I don’t think it matters how
derivative the results might be, so long as your pupil­writers have engaged themselves, at whatever level,
in real authorial decisions, and found out for themselves what the Assessment Foci are getting at.
Things to do:
use short stories as a way into genre, historical period, theme – they’re often helpfully
anthologised
recast the story into another medium – short play or video, perhaps
try ‘mini­sagas’ – tell a whole story in precisely fifty words. (More about them here:
http://users.aber.ac.uk/jpm/minisagas1.html )
if you have to discuss a story after having read it, start by asking ‘What are the questions this story
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makes you want to ask?’ That should give you both open responses, and lots of insight into the
way your pupils’ minds work.
Podcasting with reluctant writers | Andrew Buckton
How do you get reluctant writers to engage with crafting a short story? One way is to
have a go at podcasting. Radio 4 are big on broadcasting short stories, and the BBC
National Short Story Award is a pretty well known writing competition that receives
plenty of media attention. Pupils can listen to short stories on BBC iPlayer or live on
the radio to get a good idea how one should sound. A good short story lends itself
well to being broadcast, and that’s all a podcast is really – recorded audio ready to
broadcast.
For seriously reluctant writers, who would not dream of putting pen to paper or
type anything on a keyboard at all, a podcast can be developed in the way that
There is no greater
a piece of writing can be. They can make a rough draft orally, add ideas as
agony than bearing
they go along, edit and replace sections and individual words and swap the
an untold story
order around of sections they have recorded. It can be a highly engaging way
inside you.
of getting pupils to get involved with the short story form. Maya Angelou
Pupils not only record a voice reading the short story aloud, but they also get
to ‘play’ with some simple but fun technology that puts a modern twist to any
recording. If using Apple’s Garageband software, for example, pupils can add sound effects and music to
add to the impact of the story. If your ICT set up allows, pupils could put music tracks from their ipods or
‘phones onto the podcast as well as music and sound effects from a library of resources built in to the
software. For non Apple users, recording directly to computer is easy with a free download called
Audacity, and pupils can easily do the same thing – adding additional tracks of music or sound effects
from different sources.
The editing tools tend to be straightforward, and a section of recorded audio can be presented visually
like a graph. It is then easy to cut even single words or sounds out as pupils refine what they have written.
The software on Garageband works by dragging highlighted sections around and is very intuitive. When
finished, a podcast can be dragged in to iTunes where it will be automatically converted to a stereo track
or MP3 file. The visual way of working on sound graphs could even be adapted to working with pupils on
actual text. They could highlight words and cut and paste them in the same way that they have
manipulated audio sound waves as graphs. Unlikely that they’ll want their mates to listen to them from
their ‘phones sharing an earpiece but you never know.
Using short stories in the teaching of writing | Phil Beadle
Life anywhere near the bottom of the education system
often involves dealing with the unwanted and unimagined
consequences of the vote­winning Whitehall policy feint.
Judging schools on the number of kids getting five A*–Cs
including English and maths is a decent enough sop to
the voter to have some of them believe that literacy and
numeracy have assumed the significance they deserve;
not enough, though, to have protected schools from the
never­ending imbecile rapacity of the CBI. (And so
functional skills are coming to get ya, as a further soppier sop to Mr
Businessman’s unquestioned expertise in all things educational.)
No, it's not a very
good story ­ its
author was too
busy listening to
other voices to
listen as closely as
he should have to
the one coming
from inside.
Stephen King The unintended consequence of five A*–C’s including English and maths is
that literature dies (certainly for those who are C/D borderlines in English). As
all hands must be to the pump in getting the barely literate the qualification that ensures their schools
existence come 2011, literature is routinely dropped for anyone who is below being a certain C in English.
An unintended consequence too far?
As a result of this, it is now several years since I have been allowed to teach the short stories in the AQA
anthology, and I recall little (aside from offering up Robert Quick in Joyce Carey’s ‘Growing Up’ as a
genuine literary hero) that is of any use to the initiate.
Where I am still using short stories is in the teaching of writing. Much of what we do as teachers of writing
is to help our young adults write more like children. We advise them to plaster their prose with adjectives
and adverbs so that it becomes vivid. Yet those adjectives after a certain age begin to cloy, become
repulsively florid; a sign of our kids lack of development into the realms of being adult writers and, by year
11, both class and teacher are in darned good of a palate cleanser.
Any story in Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is perfect for the job. If you
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are an English teacher and you haven’t read them, you are in for a treat. If you have read them, then you’ll
be richly aware that they will give you the opportunity to teach kids the difference between the style of
writing we have been teaching them for years, and the type of writing that deserves the epithet, ‘stylish’.
In spending a lesson or two comparing our own work to Carver’s, we get to see how sparseness can be
combined with detail to produce something that does not rely on a blanket sprinkling of clichéd adjectives
to create colour. We also get to bathe in the work of one of the twentieth centuries more interesting writers.
It’s worth a good couple of lessons. You may even get to use the key word, “Spartan.”
Oh yeh, and buy Speaking with the Angel. The best set of short stories I’ve read, featuring a story by Nick
Hornby called ‘Nipple Jesus’, which always goes down fantastically well with older kids. Webwatch | Rhiannon Glover
Sometimes I get students who complain that because they’ve studied English or
Media Studies they can no longer just read or just watch. Instead they’re thinking
about what sort of narrative voice a writer has used or why a director has chosen a
high angled shot at this point in the film. I know this feeling but for teachers it’s worse
(or better, depending on your point of view). Of course, you do think about how a text
has been constructed rather than just enjoying it for what it is, but you’re also thinking
how would this go down with Year 9 or wouldn’t this picture/newspaper article/poem/
documentary make a good starting point for a lesson?
I read this article on cutting a long story short in The Guardian in 2007 evidently (thank you Google!), and
filed it away in the part of my English teacher’s mind labelled ‘Could come in useful’. And now it has.
Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s six word short story ­ 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.' ­ The Guardian
asked contemporary authors to write their own super short stories. You could use these as an introduction
to a lesson on what makes a great short story because you’ve got it all here: enigma, irony, different
genres, the twist in the tale, humour and, above all, the beauty of brevity. You could also have a lot of fun
getting students to write their own six word short story or asking them to use one of the six word stories
commissioned by The Guardian as the opening or ending to a longer piece of original writing.
If you like your short stories just a little bit, well, less short, there are lots of websites packed with short
stories of all shapes and sizes. At the short story section on East of the Web you can find featured stories
of the month and browse the library by genre, title, author or keyword. There is also a section for kids’
short stories. Over 2000 short stories can be found at American Literature including the site’s choice of
twenty great American short stories and the short story of the day.
You can browse many more stories at Classic Shorts and Bibliomania while Story campaigns to celebrate
the short story, providing information about competitions, events, workshops and projects and advice
about writing short stories, as well as offering its own story collection. On this site you can also read a
‘Think Piece’ from Di Speirs, Readings Editor at BBC Radio Drama. She reminds us that BBC Radio 4 is
the world’s biggest single commissioner of short stories and ‘Three days a week, fifty two weeks a year, at
3.30, the BBC broadcasts a short story on Radio 4; there are more to be found on weekend evenings,
some are dramatized for play slots such as the Afternoon Play, others appear in the concert intervals on
Radio 3.’
Also on Radio 4 (or available through iPlayer), although not exactly a short story, you can listen to Our
Mutual Friend serialised as it was first published. While my copy is a mere 746 pages long, the Radio 4
version is broken up into lovely, short story sized, 15 minute chunks so you can savour it in pieces like a
delicious bar of chocolate.
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