Michael Rosen - “I remember all my teachers”

From 11-plus stress to tea with Mrs Hirst on Uxbridge Road, every moment of Michael Rosen’s life at school is there to be mined for poetry and prose...

Teach Primary: Did you enjoy your primary school years?

Michael Rosen: Yes, I have hundreds and hundreds of memories from school which are positive overall – I was a sociable guy who always had friends – but during the fourth year juniors (now Year 6) I became obsessed with passing my 11 plus. I have to try not to view all seven and a half years of education through the stressful prism of that final year.

TP: You felt the pressure of the system, then?

MR: We were told in my class that only half of us would pass our 11 plus. We took tests every week, the results were averaged out and we moved around the classroom on a Friday in relation to our position in the class rankings. You always knew where you were – if you were below 24 you were told you would fail. People forget this sort of practice was normal in those days. I was someone who did very well in English and rather badly in maths, so I had this sense there was this abyss just to my left where I might fall and end up at a secondary modern. In fact, the secondary moderns round about were fine, but there were always stories that they were places full of dangerous criminal bullies who would slash you to bits with flick knives – this was the era of the Teddy Boy, don’t forget – so the idea was if you went to any of the three secondary moderns near us you would just die, basically.

TP: Did the pressure come from your teachers, parents, or just yourself?

MR: All three. My mum was a primary teacher, my dad taught at one of the local grammar schools, and my brother went to one. There was an assumption made by everyone that if you were from that kind of background, you would go to a grammar. When people make assumptions about children they often forget that it puts pressure on them rather than relaxes them, so if you say, “Oh, you’ll be alright,” often the child feels differently. I used to sit up at night worrying.

One night my mum came up with some Bournvita and she did something she wasn’t supposed to do – she told me I had a guaranteed place, so I wasn’t to worry. Basically, schools could fiddle the 11 plus, so children who failed the exam but who had the headteacher’s recommendation would get a place. It took the pressure off.

TP: Did any one teacher have a particular impact on you?

MR: I’ve spent my entire life digging archaeologically into my background and recycling my memories as poems and stories, so believe it or not, I remember all my teachers from nursery through to the end of university and can tell you all their names and what they looked like. I’m rather odd like that.

At my first school, Pinner Wood, in Harrow, we had a teacher in second year infants called Mrs Hirst. We absolutely adored her, so much so my friend, Brian, told me where she lived. We went round to her house, an old cottage on the Uxbridge Road (the traffic was lethal, even back then), knocked on her door and she invited us in for tea. We just sat, ate and talked. She was just on the point of retirement and seemed very granny-like to us. Thinking back it’s extraordinary – she must have been born in the 1890s. That was Victorian hospitality!

And then there was headteacher Miss Stafford, who used to tell Old Testament stories using coloured chalk and a blackboard during assemblies. I remember her saying once in front of the whole school, “Michael, what is the matter with you? Have you got ants in your pants?” I nearly died with embarrassment.

I rather looked up to and admired Mr Baggs, the deputy head at West Lodge, the second primary school I attended. He used to josh me in a friendly way, as if I was a grown up, and I used to really like that because it almost seemed he respected me. In those days you rarely got a sense that any teacher respected you.

TP: What inspired you to write for a living?

MR: I knew by the time I was about 10 that I loved writing and was constantly, albeit within the curriculum, experimenting with different styles in my weekly ‘composition’ – what we now call creative writing. By the time I was 14, I’d got into the notion I could write in my spare time – it hadn’t fully occurred to me before then. And then there were my parents, who were not only teachers, but poets, writers, storytellers and academics. They taught me two things: to be endlessly curious and to believe I was entitled to access any cultural form out there, whether that be Shakespeare, a comic or Bob Dylan. They taught me the powers of interpretation and gave the sense that everything was accessible.

TP: You are almost as well known for your performance of your poetry as much as you are for the words you write. How did you learn to do this?

MR: I had the stream of the theatre running through me from about the age of 10 when I got involved in drama clubs, but it only clicked that performance could be married to poetry after I started reading my poems in schools. Initially I read them with the book in front of my face in a serious poem-voice. Then one day, I turned up at a school and a teacher started animating my poems back at me. He stood up in front of the school and kind of danced one of the verses. The children all joined in and then I thought, ah! After that I incorporated all the stuff that I’d learned in theatre and movement classes.

TP: How can teachers inspire children to love poetry?

MR: The curriculum deals with poetry as units to be taught. Teachers have a little matrix of stuff they’re supposed to teach, but try and hold off doing all that alliteration, metaphor and personification stuff until the children have formed their own attachments and preferences. Get away from the notion that poetry is medicine that’s going to do you good and encourage children to think of it as something like music, to be enjoyed. In other words, the first thing you do is just make it available – pin it up, share it, read poems to each other and get children to interpret them in their own way. Allow the poems to belong to the children, not the teacher.

If children can take a poem and find a dance for it, or take a dance and write a poem, then you’re showing them that all these art forms merge into each other as acts of human interpretation. It isn’t airy-fairy at all – these are quite challenging things to do – but I’m afraid the Department of Education has treated this poetry thing as if it’s a kind of encyclopaedic knowledge, a body of high art that must be injected into the children. This is complete nonsense. It’s only through getting children to learn to interpret poetry themselves and own it, by talking in pairs or groups and generating questions – that they’re able to stay engaged and move onto to learning the next body of knowledge.

It bears repeating

We’re Going On a Bear Hunt is celebrating its 25th Walker Books and Read for RNIB are joining Michael Rosen in an attempt to break the Guinness record for the world’s largest reading lesson. The event, which takes place at 10am on 15th in front of 1000 children, will be broadcast live at jointhebearhunt.com/rnib, so all schools can get involved. This ‘real life’ bear hunt will take the form of a curriculum-approved reading lesson created by education specialists Yellow Door. Visit the website (jointhebearhunt.com/rnib) and find out how to get your We’re Going on a Bear Hunt pack, which includes the full reading lesson plan for the event. anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, July