HSC English Module C 'The Craft of Writing' continues to perplex students about the nature and possibilities of such weird animals as...

One of the big tasks of Term 1 is checking on the progress of senior research projects. Have students thought about them over the...

Whenever you put your foot on the accelerator, there's a bang from the engine as the car goes forward. You take it to the mechanic, and...

A mullet: the ultimate mixed mode response It's ok to mix modes in your writing. Most speech isn't purely one thing or another: in the...

Often we move straight into the study of the texts themselves in Module A without thinking about influence and intertextuality...

In the language of pandemic, the HSC Advanced Module B rubric says that students will develop 'detailed analytical and critical...

Like most pessimists, I perk up in times of despair. There's endless opportunities to say I told you so, and as standards become...

Writing about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the historian Geoffrey Roberts says that On the Soviet side the pact emerged from a process of...

This week I discovered the value of a school blazer: it clearly tells kids what the school values. 'Truth, Justice, and Diddling the Tax...

Students often seem to stumble on essay questions which ask them to consider 'the representation' of something. In the previous...

In the last History post, I suggested that students can find traces of historians' very early schooling in the way they construct their...

In this term's opening lesson on Module A: Textual Conversations, one student said 'Don't conversations involve both people taking turns?...

The first topic of History Extension is easily my favourite thing to teach, because there's never a time I don't feel as if I'm teetering...

When I came back to Australia from doing a DPhil in late medieval politics at Oxford and saw that English students were required to talk...

Last week I asked what we did when we 'did' English. It had something to do with texts, reading, and meaning, I thought. Practically...

Last year I started by asking each year group that I teach 'What do we do here in English?' (for Year 7s, I asked 'What do you think...

My professional weakness is graphic novels. I just hate them. I can’t see the point, and I don’t know what to do with them. I’m worried...

As an immigrant to Australia (I'm white, so I gather I can call myself an immigrant, not the more PC 'migrant) I had no preconceived...

What makes an argument? Connection, my little vegetables. Only Tinder users are hungrier for connection than an essay. And an essay requires

One of the problems is that students forget that they’re supposed to be forming a personal response to the texts. And that often begins with