Power and Conflict - Intro

In one recent exam, around four in five students answered on Power and Conflict. Most of the room has read the same fifteen poems you have. One of the fifteen is printed in front of you. The other you choose, and write about from memory. So you are not competing with the poems. You are competing with everyone else who has read them. The marks go to the students who know which poems to hold tightest, and how to set two side by side. Here is what to watch first.

The paper has been sat seven times in June, from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty-five, with no exams in twenty twenty or twenty twenty-one. Any of the fifteen poems can be the printed one, so you prepare all of them. The list runs poem by poem, then the big ideas, then the paper itself.

If the poems are new to you, begin with All fifteen poems, and the one choice that decides your grade. It gives you what happens in each, and which of the five big ideas it answers. Exposure is a war poem where nothing happens, and the video shows how that can be the whole point. The Charge of the Light Brigade is one to look at closely, because it honours the men and records the mistake in the same poem. London is Blake's walk through a city where every street is chartered and nobody is free. Ozymandias is the king whose name is all that is left of him. My Last Duchess is where a significant minority go wrong. The duke is no grieving husband, and the video shows how he gives himself away. The Prelude is the boy, the boat and the mountain that followed him home. Kamikaze is the pilot who came home alive, and the family who never spoke to him again. Checking Out Me History is the speaker taught the nursery rhymes, who had to find his own history alone. Storm on the Island looks like weather, until the war words show what it is really about. Remains turns on a man who was probably armed, possibly not, and a soldier who cannot stop seeing him. Bayonet Charge drops you into a soldier who wakes up already running. Poppies is the grief that happens at home, three days early. War Photographer is the hundred agonies he shoots, and the five or six that get printed. Tissue finds that everything that runs your life is printed on something you could tear. The Emigree is the speaker who knows her country may be gone, and keeps its sunlight anyway. Power: who has it, and how long it lasts is the big idea to begin with. Essays on the use and abuse of power do much better than essays that stay inside the details of each poem's story. The other four ideas follow it in order. The reality of conflict looks at what fighting does to the person doing it. What conflict leaves behind covers memory, grief and the people who were never there. The power of nature is the force in these poems that does not know you are there. Identity and belonging is about who you are when the place is taken away. Bedrock poems is the video for when time is short: the six to know coldest, and why. Your paper explains what the exam asks, what it rewards, and what the rules really say about structuring the answer. One comparison, start to finish takes a printed poem all the way to a first paragraph. You can search for any video by its name or its code. The quickest way is the scholafly.com website, which lists every video in every subject.

Next in the chapter is All fifteen poems, and the one choice that decides your grade. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, oh one.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.