Of All The Pribbling Tickle-brained Clotpoles

From today’s Times, a story about the dumbing down of English exams.

This year’s national curriculum Shakespeare paper, which was supposed to be related to Macbeth, instead asked teenagers to dispense advice in the form of an agony aunt. The question was worth 20 per cent of the marks for the entire English test taken by secondary school students….Another, on Twelfth Night, told teenagers that Malvolio was a character who did not like people to enjoy themselves, then asked them to write a speech for school assembly on banning chips from the canteen menu.

At the risk of sounding horribly like my mother…eeee, it were never like that when I were a girl.

The question for students who had been studying Macbeth began: “In Macbeth, Banquo warns Macbeth about the Witches’ influence.”

It then asked them to imagine that they were giving advice to readers of a young people’s magazine and to respond to the following request: “I have recently moved school and made some new friends. I like spending time with them, but my form tutor thinks my work is suffering. What should I do?”

I’m assuming that the Shakespearian Agony Aunt’s response would go something like this:

“Thou Lumpish Beetle-headed Puttock,

Thy teacher is a mummering knotty-pated, flap-mouthed maggot pie. Boil her up in a cauldron with some eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog. And while thou is at it, chuck in some adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing. That’ll showest the fat-kidneyed moldwarp.”

Donna