SATs

As part of my school governor involvement, I attended a couple of the SATs at our local primary school. Standard Assessment Tests have been on the go in primary schools since the 1990s, so by now a lot of children have experienced them. But until now, I'd never seen how they are administered. Sitting as an observer in a school hall with twenty Year 6 pupils, each at individual desks, separated by a regulated distance from one another, I felt for these eleven year olds. The strict exam protocol reminded me of my school exams, and not pleasantly so. Exam papers were placed on desks, and at an agreed start signal, the children would turn them over and begin, for the specified duration of the exam. No wonder that some children find it stresses them out. I felt nervous myself, especially as I read the questions. Finding examples of adverbial nouns took me a while, as did an example of a past completed tense.  These youngsters do pretty well to cope with this level of examination.   

M R James at Bury St Edmunds

 M R James' Ghost Stories are a treat to read, and can still send a tingle down the spine, couched as they are in James' buttoned up English voice of the 1930s.It's his restraint and economy of words which hints at hidden horrors in the lives of his characters and the things they are gradually and unexpectedly uncovering. The stories were only a sideline to his professional life as a medievalist scholar, but they made his name very well known to the reading public.  Visting Bury St Edmunds recently to see my sister, I took a walk through the ruins of the once large and influential Benedictine monastery in the town, and was pleasantly surprised to see James' name on one of the display boards at the site of the Chapter House. He was a key player in discovering, from his research, that six former abbots of the monastery were buried there. It led to an excavation at the turn of the 1900s. No wonder that James was able to turn his hand to Christmas ghost stories, because he had a large reservoir of detailed medieval knowledge which he was able to creatively re-work. One such story springs to mind:  'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas'.