Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The emoji con

We are appalled by diets of popcorn and chips. What about the reading and writing diet of hearts and stars?

issue 12 May 2018

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.

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