Far beyond a niche hobby or idle facination, Marsden says that act of carefully observing birds around campus is a powerful means of teaching students to develop their own authentic writing voice – one that is brave enough to stray from formal language rules that can so often crush youngsters’ confidence in pursuing lively prose.
Inspired by Kimon Nicolaides’s book, The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art, recently Marsden took a Year 7 class out for a spot of feathered notetaking.
“Reading [Nicolaide’s book] made me aware, yet again, of just the power of being observant,” Marsden, who heads up Candlebark and Alice Miller School in Victoria, tells EducationHQ.
“One of the things he had art students do, was to do drawings of people, or creatures or whatever, but to show the way they act, the way they move.
“And he emphasised, ‘don’t worry about what their colours are, or what their size or what their shape is, just concentrate on their movement’.”
Armed with this same brief and a notepad, Marsden’s students took to the activity tremendously well.
“Their observations were wonderful, and I learned new things about birds, just from reading what they’d written,” the school leader explains.
“I’m doing stuff like that all the time, because I want them to regain what they had as infants; where they were watching the world with fresh eyes, and they were just taking it all in with open eyes, sort of literally and figuratively.”
Marsden says he’s seen too many English classrooms where children are taught that language rules and conventions are to be adhered to at all times.
This is ultimately damaging, he suggests, and leads to cumbersome writing that strays from students’ authentic voice.
“One of the conventions in primary school … is that children are taught to use adjectives, ‘describing words’ they used to be called, and adverbs.
“And that’s really bad advice, because adverbs in particular could almost be abolished, and you’d have better writing as a result.
“…it’s very rarely that you need to use an adverb, and they’re often detrimental to the writing, because they tell rather than show.”
Meanwhile, ‘an economy’ of adjectives is something students should in fact aim for, Marsden says.
“Unless they’re used with great skill, if you use a lot of them, they’ll clutter the writing up and make it more obscure and more heavy-handed.”
This is not to suggest children should not be taught the conventions of the English language, he clarifies, as students do need to understand ‘what works and what doesn’t’, and what’s appropriate across difference contexts, genres and situations.
“But we have to teach them all the time in a way that makes it clear that they are not rules to be followed, like religiously, and if you don’t follow the rules, but you know what you’re doing, that’s absolutely fine,” Marsden argues.
The school leader says a recent ABC Radio panel discussion on Albert Einstein hit home on this point.
Someone on this panel said, ‘the thing about Einstein is he thought outside the box’, and another panel member said, ‘the thing about Einstein is that he knew what was in the box before he thought outside the box’.
“To me, that’s what English teachers need to learn,” Marsden says.
“We teach that stuff that’s ‘in the box’ so that students do know that when they’re writing a job application or a letter to Westpac complaining about their mortgage interest rates, then they use English which will probably be quite formal and quite conventional.
“But when they’re writing a letter to someone they love, or someone they’re angry at, or when they’re talking to someone who they care deeply about or they want to convey important messages, they need to do so in their own voice.
“And [understand] that fresh language and vivid language, and language that is authentic, will do far, far more.”
Marsden points out that some of the most revered writers have paid little attention to the ‘rules’ of written English.
“Cormac McCarthy, in all of his books, and there weren’t many, [but] they were admirable, I think he used a comma five times from memory, and never used a semi-colon or colon.
“And James Joyce, [his] last sentence in Ulysses, I remember offhand is 16,000 words, I think, with no punctuation at all – not a single comma or full stop.
“And that’s one of the most admired books ever written…
“So, the first principle is that there are no rules, there are ‘conventions’.”
