The emoji con

Smiley face. Sad face. Smoochy face. Sick face. Edvard Munch ‘Scream’ face. How are you feeling today? Any of the above?

When I worked as a teacher at a Saturday school for children who were struggling with English and maths, my pupils, all of whom were primary school age, had two emotions: they were ‘good’ (breaktime) or they were ‘sad’ (seven times table, spelling test).

Sometimes, when teaching one-on-one, working our way through cat, cat, cats and mat, mat, mats, with the boys who were furthest behind, I would ask: ‘How do you feel about school?’ They would say: ‘I feel sad.’ But they didn’t mean that. They meant: I feel frustrated. I feel thwarted. I feel ashamed, persecuted, wronged, neglected. But the only word they had was ‘sad’.

The boys who had been hauled off to see school counsellors would say: ‘I feel angry.’ Or, in baby language: ‘I feel cross.’ Mummy is ‘cross’ because you haven’t tidied your room. A ten-year-old boy with a deepening voice and a bum-fluff moustache isn’t ‘cross’ because he can’t read or add-up or tell the time; he’s ashamed, desperate, humiliated, bitter and furious. Furious with his teachers, with his parents, and with his own mute inability to tell anyone what this state of left-behind arrested infanthood feels like. One boy, due to go up to secondary school in September, was still struggling with ‘dog’ and ‘log’. Sad? I wanted to weep.

Teachers talk of a ‘word gap’. In a study published by Oxford University Press, 800 secondary school teachers described pupils with a limited vocabulary being held back not only in English, but in history, geography and religious studies. The research cited two major problems: never reading for pleasure, and too little in the way of grown-up conversation.