Before becoming a research assistant, I hadn’t set foot in a primary school in over a decade. Upon seeing the classrooms as an adult, I got a very different impression of them, and not only because the year six level maths on the whiteboard now appeared incomprehensible to me, although that did call for some self-reflection as well. I was used to having jobs that lacked faith or promoted profit over meaningful work that I was completely unprepared for the amount of energy and optimism that surrounded the pupils.
The staffroom was festooned with reaffirming photos and quotes that extolled how great a job the teachers were doing, while every surface in the classrooms celebrated the students’ learning and achievement in a way that I hadn’t experienced since leaving education. It seemed as though the contributions of every member of staff were valued, which is a rare thing. Seeing how inspiring this workplace was really renewed my confidence in the Writing Over Time project, which had suffered from the isolation that so many people have felt working from home throughout the pandemic.
When I handed the booklets, I had expected that the 11 year-olds would be disappointed and resign themselves to writing the bare minimum that I and the other research assistants could coax out of them, but the enthusiasm with which they took to writing their stories took me by surprise. Many of the students chose subjects that I would never have even considered at that age, drawing from everything from The Avengers to Greek mythology. Seeing how passionate they were about English after all cured me of any scepticism or disillusion I could ever have had.
One part of the Writing Over Time project is to test the narrative abilities of children from the 1980s compared with the 2020s. The task is to write a new ending to a well-known story, and consistently the majority have chosen a fairy-tale, with only a few contemporary retellings of films from the latest few schools. These can be quite repetitive, however one pupil from 1980 will always remain in my memory because the plot twists made me laugh out loud in a silent library. It began with an account of the Battle of the Boyne, recalling the troop movements in detail and with prose far superior to any historical novel I’ve ever read. I would highly recommend reading the scan below:
