Charlotte Bronte

Picture the scene. You’re teaching a class of rowdy eleven and twelve year-olds, trying desperately to elicit some vocabulary or practise a grammar point. New to young learner classes, you haven’t quite got a handle on discipline yet and are worried that the restlessness bubbling away in front of you might at any second boil over into chaos. Left to their own devices – for example, should you to need dash off to the staff room for a set of photocopies – you’re worried your charges will run amok, un-taming the classroom and turning it into something out of Lord of the Flies. You might, at just such a moment, be sorely tempted to change career. If so, then there’s a veritable list of former English teachers in whose footsteps you might want to follow. One of them was the author of Lord of the Flies himself, William Golding. It was his experience of teaching English to unruly boys at an all-boys school in Salisbury, England, combined with the horrors he had witnessed in the Second World War, which inspired him to write his famous dystopian novel. Continue reading →