Please Mrs Butler: The timeless school poetry collection

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The lines conclude with, “But don’t ask me!” Although the teacher is the only one who has the power to do anything about these minor inconveniences, she is not willing to. This is clearly quite frustrating for the student but, very likely, not nearly as frustrating as being constantly barraged by questions and issues is for the teacher. Supply Teacher' is one of my favourites. Ahlberg uses an introductory verse followed by two verses concluded with the all too familiar phrases; Haircut' depicts a common fear in many children's lives - standing out. At school consistency is key; the minute you change your appearance someone will have something to say about it. Ahlberg captures the annoyance at being told the blatantly obvious;

Alliteration: a common literary device in children’s poetry. It’s seen through the repetition of consonant sounds, like “Derek Drew.” The teacher has a surprising answer. Readers are likely expecting to hear the teacher chastise the child, Derek, and possibly praise the young speaker for doing what’s right. But, the teacher does something very different. Using anaphora, the poet describes the teacher telling her student to “sit in the hall” or “sit in the sink.” There are a few different themes that one might interpret from this poem. One of the primary options is self-reliance. The teacher is unwilling to provide the student with the answers they are looking for. Instead, they are forced, in theory, to solve their own problems. From the opening verse of the first poem it is easy to see how beneficial such a collection is to a child's understanding of the features of the literary form such as structure, verse, rhythm and rhyming couplets: The final line is perfect as it breaks from the pattern of the two previous verses, but maintains the effective structure;

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After this, the teacher refers to the student as “my lamb.” This is no doubt meant as a term of endearment, but it also comes across as patronizing and dismissive. It’s clear the teacher doesn’t want to spend any time on this issue. According to a list I saw the other day, Please Mrs Butler is one of the top ten favourite children's poems in the UK. It is the first poem in this collection and we used to have it read to us in infant school every day so it felt. Due to oversaturation, it is not my favourite of the collection, but I do think this whole book is filled with very clever observations of the absurdities of both children and teachers and creates a lot of nostalgia. They are a little old-fashioned. Even when I was in school, teachers didn't smoke in the staffroom and headteachers couldn't punish children with slippers, and that was over thirty years ago, so I've no idea how accurate it is to MODERN primary school life, but it certainly feels accurate to what I remember. I always think this would make an excellent school play. There aren’t many modern or contemporary poems which recall schooldays with affection, but ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ does just that. Duffy paints a fond picture of her time at primary school and on the brink of adolescence, powerfully suggested by the poem’s final image of the sky breaking into a thunderstorm. The italics used to emphasise the "our" and "other" make the verse very effective for reading aloud to a class, and the children can have great fun joining in with this. The rhyming words and structure of the poem can be demonstrated in a literacy lesson.

I read this poem to my year 1 class during BSE and they absolutely enjoyed it. Although this poem is fairly outdated, the comical content still produced a lot of laughter from the children. Moreover, the repetitive nature of the poem engaged the children to participate in the reading of the poem. Parallelism: the use of the same line structure. For example, likes one and two of stanza two as well as the structures of all the odd-numbered stanzas. Whole class activities Shared writing. Begin by asking pupils to help you make a list of the things people say in school. This could be divided up into two halves: things teachers say, and things children say. Compare the different statements. What do the children's statements have in common with each other, and the teachers'? How are the two different kinds of statement different? What do they tell us about the people concerned? What kinds of tone of voice are they spoken in? Discuss the feelings of both parties.

Allan Ahlberg

Please Mrs Butler was voted the most important twentieth-century children's poetry book in a Books for Keeps poll. I used this poem as a tool to help the children write their own poems, as well as getting them to replace ‘Derek Drew’ for their partners name as an alliteration.