Last week, I wrote about some of ‘the magic’ of teaching English, and this week I received a lovely email from a parent encapsulating this magic in action.

In supporting one of my GCSE students with her ‘Macbeth’ revision, I witnessed the culmination of her diligent efforts to master her studies of the play. The highest purpose of any teaching engagement is to usher students through the stages of skill building - from development, to security, to mastery. Thanks to her own revision, this student knew the play inside out, and thanks to her ongoing, willing wrestling with Shakespearean language, she was able to pick out relevant imagery from a given passage, pull out its meaning and explain its effects in detail. This student began our work together with no love of Shakespeare; this week her mother wrote to tell me that her daughter had read her own finished piece of work out loud to her, with confidence and enjoyment. Her mother wrote, in phrases I will treasure: ‘She looked calm and passionate at the same time. It was a lovely moment.’

English teaching, done right, imparts a love of working language. As the cycle of life and learning would have it, my own love of Shakespeare was sparked by a school trip to Stratford, Ontario when I was 14, where I saw a performance of ‘Macbeth’. Full of witches and ghosts, murder and gore, it was the best thing I had ever seen, and I was electrified by it. That moment powered decades of Shakespeare studies, which in turn fuelled this moment of a student reading her essay to her mum.

The magic imparted. Good stuff.