• SchoolVisitWhat do teachers want from a school visit?

    I’ve been visiting schools for years now, telling stories, sharing my writing strategies, showing how to draw things and, I hope, inspiring the odd child here and there.

    I’ve never been a teacher. I’ve not trained as a teacher. In staff room conversations, it’s clear that many teachers think I’m an ex-teacher that has escaped! But I’m not. I started as an illustrator and was pretty much taught to write by my editors. I don’t think of myself as a writer, because I’m dyslexic and have my own peculiar ways of planning, plotting and writing stories. I’ve worked very hard to find my own way of doing it. If I had to do it the way the National Curriculum suggests, I would never have written anything. But I think my experience is useful for those kids, like me, who just don’t get it.

    My focus is on dreaming up stories and characters, writing them down and drawing the illustrations. Schools and teachers have a very different focus, and the system makes them change that focus all the time. There’s a whole new curriculum coming along. It’s hard to keep up as a teacher – harder if you are not in the system very day.

    Some schools I go to are happy just to have a day of fun, celebrating stories. I feel that others want “measurable outcomes”, a phrase that makes my heart sink, but I appreciate the world we live in and know that teachers are under huge pressure to deliver and much work can be achieved during and following an author visit.

    No one teaches authors how to do school visits. We write a book and are thrown in at the deep end, complete innocents thrown to the crocodiles, and we have to work something out – quick!. My sessions are like Jazz. I have a whole load of riffs that I can call on from years of experience. I modulate my delivery according to the age the group and the life experience they have. I sense the level of the audience and play what I feel will be the right note. Sometimes its spectacularly right and at other times… less so!

    And then I’m gone and never quite get time to talk to the teachers to get some feedback or know what they would have preferred. They are far too polite to make suggestions, but sometimes I’ll see follow on work at the end of the day, and that gives me new ideas for how I can tailor what I do, so the next group can take my characters and situations and draw or write their own stories.

    If you were planning a perfect author visit to school, (you’d want J K Rowling, I know!) what would you really like an author – like me – to do? It would be good to know!

  • My revelation yesterday, that there is such a thing as musical dyslexia, has got me thinking.

    Speech music and image making are innate, primal urges. Watch any young child and they love talking and singing along with nursery rhymes, bashing along with a tambourine and scribbling away with crayons. They can get lost in these activities for hours. Their naivety allows them to experiment without the worry of “what people will think.”

    These activities soon become formalised in reading and writing, musical scales and Art. Each with it’s prescribed systems of notation and accepted styles and each with it’s barriers to entry designed over the years to keep the professions secure in their income.

    Although it seems there will be some learning of poetry by wrote in the new curriculum, the oral tradition has pretty much disappeared, replaced by an obsession with spelling and grammar. No one’s brains are wired up the same way. Dyslexics not only have to battle with making the words stay still on the page or having letters appear facing in a different direction to everyone else, they have then to worry first about the spelling and where the commas go. That is how their literacy skills are judged and approved of.

    If you can’t make head or tail of scales or musical notation, there is no place for you in the approved world of music. If the notes leap about and the staves vibrate on the page, you are not going to fit into the world of music. We rarely hear live amateur performances these days. Mostly we hear auto-tuned, note perfect music, timed to atomic clock perfection. That is how we judge ourselves and how we judge an amateur performance. What about all those no-hopers on The X Factor, that are such fun to laugh at, who are honestly crestfallen when they are told they are no good? Once upon a time they would have been the best of their communities, loved and encouraged, providing the only entertainment available.

    And the day eventually comes when a child is told to draw properly and stop scribbling. That is the end of experimentation and learning how the materials work. They have been judged to be scribblers. There is no point picking up a pencil if you are not going to make an acceptable work of art. And now we are so bombarded by images of perfection. Most are tweaked to withing an inch of thier life onphotoshop,

  • Read-Pillar-Box-SmallI will be at the Great British Family Fayre on the 31st August 2013. Why not come along?

    I’ll be with Derwent Pencils, showing off their great products and showing how to draw all sorts of things.

    To get you in the British mood, I thought I’d show you how to draw a British Pillar Box. There’s one of these on the corner of almost every street. It’s what you put your letters or mail in for the Post Office to come an collect and send to your frinds. You might call it a mail box. They are painted in “Pillar Box Red” except for one or two gold ones which are in the towns where Olympic Gold Medal winners live!

    You can tell how high they are by the amount of black showing at the bottom. The more black, the higher they are. I learned this when I was younger and could not go past a pillar box without leap-frogging over it!

    In this video I used my nice new set of Derwent coloursoft pencils.

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