English
Year 8 Othello Workshop
Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors (and signoras)….
On 7th October 2024, over 40 William Ellis Year 9 students took part in a morning drama workshop on one of their upcoming texts, Shakespeare’s Othello.
The workshop was led by (Professor) John Yandell from the UCL Institute of Education who brought in a team of student teachers of English to work with our Year 9s.
John described the students as being ‘a credit to the school and to the English department.’ He added, ‘For my PGCE students, this was the best possible introduction to a London secondary school. They were all able to observe (and enjoy) your Year 9 students’ growing confidence in their own capacity to make meaning from a Shakespearean text. In our brief discussion after the workshop, they praised your students for their readiness to enter into the activities, for the fluency and acuity of their reading of a script they had only just encountered, and for the wonderful inventiveness of the performances. More than this, though, they recognised how much the students had learnt about the play through the workshop.’
The students were asked to come up with statements about the play’s meaning based on their first encounter with it, and a few of their responses are included here:
Othello is a play about:
… love and hate with destruction and how it depicts trust and manipulation
… jealousy and how people show their true nature
… murder, love and deception and how the biggest betrayal can happen from within
John Yandell finished with ‘Please let them know how much we appreciated them!’
Year 9 Orwell Workshop
The English department was delighted to host Vicky Price, UCL IoE outreach officer and archivist, for a series of seminars on the life of George Orwell, essayist, writer and author of our Year 9 novel Animal Farm.
Students had the opportunity to learn lots about the author and influences on his writing, as well as find out about the rich resources of UCL’s archives.
The WES English team is proud to report that students were really engaged throughout, asking thoughtful questions, and eager to learn more about a key writer of the twentieth century.
Vicky was also able to tell the students a little about her job as an archivist, a career option that hadn’t occurred to any of them, and one that – presumably – will always exist in one form or another.
Here are photos of George Orwell with his goat, Muriel, and his dog, Marx:
