Kate Clanchy
@KateClanchy1
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Writer and Teacher Mostly poems by young people. Contact kate @kateclanchy .com
Oxford, England
Joined January 2017
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R is our school's top English student. She got 9 at GCSE. She got A at AS. She is studious, precise, deeply thoughtful. She has just had her A Level grade reduced from A* to C, apparently just because she goes to a disadvantaged school. It might help if you liked her poem.
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Aisha got a 6 at GCSE because she is so dyslexic and because GCSE doesn't give marks for work like this.
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Please read this long but awesome poem in which Kyla skewers the psychology lesson. She's 17.
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The kids always write the best poems after they've stopped listening to me. For example, I usually tell them to avoid rhyming couplets, because they govern the poem and tend to be comic - but this has heavy rhyme, and it's heartbreaking.
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I’m trying to judge our Year 9 Poetry Competition, but it’s much too hard. Freya is 13
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What animal is your heart? Is one of my favourite poetry questions. But I've never had an answer like this. Kyla is 17.
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When I am stuck for a lesson with young students, I ask them to 'tell me a lie about the sea.' Helen was 12.
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I've registered my father's death, two weeks after my mother's. The cause of death was given as old age and 'takotsubo cardiomyopathy' which, the GP tells me, is the medical term for a broken heart.
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‘I am stuck on you like chewing gum under those desks we talk at.’ Freya is 14.
#EnglandPoems
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Aisha's A Level English has been downgraded to a D, but it's okay as she has unconditional offer for uni because of her poetry portfolio.
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'Refugee' is no one's ambition. Mohamed was 13 and from Syria
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'I didn’t realise it was the in-between times that held me together.'
Linnet is 17.
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I've posted this before, but there are so many children in Syria whose names can't even be recorded, let alone their poems. Mohamed is 12 and from Damascus.
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Happy Birthday to me. I’m 56. Here I am giving a cabinet minster a teacher stare. I never thought such a day would dawn.
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I have divided my heart and half of it is in Syria.
Mohammed is 12.
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Ftoun worked and worked but only got 4 in her English GCSE. She came here from Syria in 2016. Marks for her poem below please.
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When people think of Oxford, they think of OX1 - historical, beautiful, rich as Mayfair. But Anna lives in OX4, as ethnically mixed and deprived as Hackney, and this is her poem about it. She's 17.
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This is a thread for my mother, Joan Clanchy, who was born in first days of the Second World War and died yesterday in hospital.
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I keep wishing I could show my mum this piece about her death.
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‘I didn’t realise it was the in-between times that held me together.’ Linnet is 17.
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Some kids write hundreds of poems, like Freya and Flora. Some kids just write one, and this is Jamie's. I think he was 11. 'My life is a seed/waiting for water.'
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'His whole world lies on that bedroom floor
and everyone says it looks like a bomb hit it'
Nell is 13.
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'Refugee' is no one's career choice. Mohamed is 12 and from Damascus
#RefugeeWeek2018
#RefugeeDay
#EnglandPoems
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Teaching idea: Ask them what they didn't do on their summer holidays. Toby was 12.
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Maisie is my student
@UniRdg_EngLit
and this powerful poem is about how hard she fought to get there.
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These are the students who are suffering. The high-achieving outliers in disadvantaged schools. I can't understand why Ofqual couldn't have sent the adjusted grades to schools in July and asked for appeals and adjustments BEFORE this destruction was done.
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Mohamed was 12 and from Syria. He was a refugee, like Priti Patel's parents.
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This is thread for my father, Michael Clanchy, who has died aged 84.
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Twitter, the news is terrifying. I offer you a small boy writing a kind poem to his kitten.
#EnglandPoems
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Anyone else out there only pretending to be a person?
Devastating poem from Bren.
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Rather than continue with her education, Mira would prefer to be a frog 'sudden as a toaster'
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'A man died quietly, like silk'. Amineh is 16 and a refugee from Syria. She will never forget her journey here.
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Nadim the four year old is in the Sunday Times today. Here is his first poem.
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We had a family funeral for my parents, Joan and Michael Clanchy, this morning. Love to everyone who knew them.
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This means so much to me as a writer and as a teacher.
Congratulations to the winner of the
#OrwellPrize
for Political Writing 2020, Kate Clanchy (
@KateClanchy1
), chosen for her reflections in 'Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me' (
@picadorbooks
) on teaching and how her students' stories offer insights into British society
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Every time I run a poetry workshop with teachers something amazing spills out. This by
@HalliburtonMrs
had us all in tears.
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All my 'very quiet foreign girls' are now graduates: from Oxford, St Andrews, London, and Reading. They all came from migration and absolute disadvantage. Poetry, idealistic teachers, and a multicultural school got them there.
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The best way to relieve the pressure on GCSE Literature 2021 would have been to restore open book exams, not to make poetry optional. Then students could have read lots of diverse, inclusive poems instead of spending hours memorising quotes.
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Sidney is 16, of Jamaican heritage, and from London- he just arrived in my class
@EMBScollege
. Please tell him he's a poet twitter, I think he needs to know.
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As GCSEs are to be awarded by postcode, I thought I'd repost Anna's poem on the subject. She's 17.
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'By the time this is over it'll be winter/high time for ice-skating' Linnet is 17.
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Mohamed didn't plan to become a refugee. Nor did Priti Patel's parents. He was 13 and from Syria.
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It’s never too late to write your first poem. Kate is 87 and widowed last March. I’m sure she’d love to know how moving this is.
@JennyAnnDee
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Phoebe watched her poem being liked on twitter last week and grew in confidence before my eyes. Then she sat down and wrote this. She tells me she's really bad at English.
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Parents struggling with fronted adverbials this morning: this is not a basic piece of knowledge you have failed to learn: it’s a complex, not-universally agreed, label for an ordinary bit of language. Grammar is not ‘the basics’ of language: it’s the description of how it works.
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Oh course I am very proud that my student Mukahang has won the Dart Prize at the University of Oxford. But I'm even prouder that the winning poem is for his mum. He's 19.
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Shukria got a First! In PPE from Goldsmiths. It's incredible! I'm going to have to make a thread to explain how incredible. Here is a poem Shukria wrote 8 years ago, when she had been in the UK 6 months. And here she is last year, at the UN.
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I've been working with Syrian Sisters in Oxford today. Zirka is 8 and she is from Aleppo.,
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Anna has a place at Corpus Christi College Oxford, OX1, to read Biomedical Sciences. They asked her about this poem.
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Take a quiet moment to read this poem by Linnet for her dying grandfather.
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Something to celebrate: Aisha kept her place
@QMUL
yesterday despite her downgrade to D in English. She really has ‘slipped off her dyslexic coat’, as she longed to in Year 8.
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I know everything is terrible. But look, Mohamed is happier. He is writing about his life in a refugee camp and his life here, and here is better, now. He is 13 and from Syria.
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I've absolutely had enough so I'm putting up the kitten poem. Ben was 11.
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Where are you going when all this is over? Naomi is 17.
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Mohamed lost so many things when he came here from Syria, but one of them was being top of the class, brilliant at Arabic. Now his language is locked inside him, but it does make poems.
#LiteratureMatters
,
@creativelangs
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Nadim the 4 year old poet is now 5 and started big school today. I expect it was still good to come home.
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Overwhelming to see all the love for Aisha. This is from when she was 12, and so dyslexic she could hardly write at all - except poems. She really has forged a sword from her unsettled words.
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Mohamed didn't come to the UK because he had special skills to offer or a job to go to. He came because his country, Syria, had been destroyed.
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The Gove GCSE doesn't let students write creatively at length. Or write a poem. Timi had to resit. This poem doesn't count.
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Friends homeschooling tomorrow: the best way I ever found to teach paragraphs was to write a story about a snake or other incongruous creature in a department store. Each time the snake moves department, you start a new paragraph. That's it.
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Aisha was 14, but her spelling age was 8 because of her dyslexia. Her poetry age was 42.
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I am so delighted that my book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me has won the 2020 Orwell Prize
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Linnet fans, Linnet has an offer to read Maths and Philosophy at Oxford. Yes I know it’s not English, but it is from a disadvantaged comprehensive and she has always had a thing for Maths.
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It does matter if you walk the kids to school. Mukahang is 19.
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If you take ten minutes at the beginning of the lesson to ask your students what sort of boots the wind is wearing this morning and what coat she has on, then no one's GCSEs will be harmed and poems will probably occur. Helen was 14.
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I know they leave everything on the floor. Try not to shout.
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The oral component of Modern Foreign Languages GCSE is also being scrapped for next year because of COVID. Like making poetry optional, it sends a powerful signal to schools and students about what is dispensable Speaking is central to languages. Poetry is central to English.
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Simon Armitage published my first book. I’ve used his poems with every class I’ve ever taught. He came to visit our school and talked to every child and didn’t ask a fee. I’m so glad he’s going to be Poet Laureate.
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Maybe teenagers can't write poems like this... or maybe only teenagers can write poems like this.. Naomi is 18.
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'I bless you /as you take down your thick posters, tack by tack,/ and roll them up like wrapping paper.' Please read Esme's tribute to her teacher, and pass it on for all teachers retiring today.
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But this year my mum got ill and Michael contracted covid 19 on her end of life visit. Five days after she died, he had a stroke, and, as he had always wanted, died serenely at home. I loved him and will him miss him so much.
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This teacher wouldn't let me put her poem in my anthology. It isn't just her that feel this though, is it?
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We are putting up a bench in memory of my parents and I know they would be so happy to see it already being sat on.
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Aisha has her 3 Bs at A Level now. But I think she's most pleased that
@QMULsed
read her writing portfolio and saw past her dyslexia, and gave her a place. When she wrote this, she was 14 but her spelling was assessed as 8.
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I talked to her every day and will always miss her. She rocked.
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Mohamed is still just a child, only 13. He’s thinking of Syria here.
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Mukahang got a
#Oxbridge
place this year. His 'context' is EAL a single parent family, weekend job as a cleaner, a sixth-form education which cost 15% of the fees at Stowe,. He's a published poet and A* student. Which Stowe student thinks they should have his place?
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The news is like a dystopian novel but at least I have found the right poem. This is my very shyest poet: she was 14.
'What's it like being lost?/the road asked.
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This is in an end-of-decade thread for Aisha. When I met her she was 11 and very determined to write poetry. She was also very, very dyslexic: she really had difficulty spelling her own name. But every time I typed up her strange pothooks some incredible emerged...
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Bren has got a First from Oxford, which is not bad for a lad from a comprehensive in the Vale of Glamorgan, and now he has to leave
@MansfieldOxford
.
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Merry Christmas twitter. Signing off with Bren's poem for Kay, the Welsh midwife so often left out of the story.
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Nadim the now-five-year-old poet has sent a poem to console me.
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'Give me a race I will/ lose, a joke I will finish'. Annie is 17 and wants out.
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In anticipation of the A Level results, and to remind us all of the foolishness of exams, I'm going put up series of Downgraded Poems. First up, and downgraded from A* to B at AS Creative Writing for using simple language, My Mother Country, Rukiya Khatun.
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One sure way to get kids started on a poem is to ask them for a lie about the sea. Jasmine was 13 when she wrote this one.
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Mukahang and Helen have got their stellar A Levels and are
#GoingtoOxford
No privilege, tutoring, private school anywhere in sight. Lots of poems though.
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Very proud of my student Helen Woods, one of 14 winners in the Foyle Young Poets Competition.
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'I would like to be the moon, and not in Year 11' . This is not a downgraded poem. After a course of poetry, Iesha got a 7 at GCSE.
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Mukahang got his A*s and his Oxford place yesterday. In celebration, a part of his epic poem, The Cleaners, written for his mother and the housekeepers of the world.
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@annasiancole
the prompt for this was this poem. We picked repeating words and well ...repeated them.
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