War Stories · Tue Jun 6, 21:43 by Eleri Straker
As mentioned before, I’m in the process of teaching The Long and the Short and the Tall to my year 10 group. One of the problems with discussing war with today’s students is the fact that they all play computer games so they all see ‘death’ and ‘war’ every day on a computer monitor. So they think they know all about it.
They have this sanitised view of killing. Fortunately they aren’t familiar with the real thing. Obviously I’m grateful for this, but it means that when discussing the reality of having to kill someone in cold blood, violently, they tend to be a bit blasé.
So I used a secret weapon. We have a volunteer learning assistant, a retired management-type. He wears a pin stripe three piece suit and is a very straight, upright sort of chap. We use him to handle the more difficult older boys, as they seem to find him surprisingly approachable. He’s also ex- military.
He’s old enough to have seen active service in Cyprus in the 50s. So I asked him to talk to my class about his war time experiences. He was amazing. He began by asking them a question: “Do you know what a bullet does to the human body?” Then he told them. They were enthralled. Even my chav princess was impressed. They couldn’t get enough of his stories. For a whole hour he kept them totally absorbed and fascinated.
The next lesson I talked to them about what my colleague had told them and they were desperate to listen to more of his stories. But they also had a changed attitude to the events in the play. It was clear from their comments that they saw the violence in the play in a different light. It was no longer ‘fun’. They also seemed to be aware of the real horror of the final scenes of the play.
I still have to get a piece of coursework out of them and that’s going to be a challenge, but at least I know that they understand more about the real horror of war. And if listening to an ex soldier alters their attitude to killing, then that has to be a good thing.
