I’m not saying I hate being a teacher, but there are some things I really, really hate teaching. And one of them is The Writing Lesson. Yes, that’s right: I’m a literary writer, and I dread teaching children to do writing.

When I’m teaching, I like to know I’m encouraging learners, not disheartening them. And the way we administer The Writing Task in key stage 2 (ages 7-12) in Scotland is, in my experience, disheartening to many of them.

We give children a “stimulus” to begin with—a question of personal significance, a fascinating object, an interesting scenario to get them interested. So far, so good. I’m all in favour of writing in response to a sensory or emotional experience. It’s great seeing children catching the inspiration, eager or at least willing to begin.
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Then we require that before they start the writing, they must produce a Story Plan. Using the template provided. Maybe it’s a series of six drawings or an Introduction/Development/Conclusion format. 

Every now and then this comes up again on social media. Someone posts a complaint that schools are WASTING CHILDREN’S TIME teaching UNNECESSARY KNOWLEDGE!

In one version, the meme claims that we only need to know how to grow food, filter water, etc. to survive. And teachers (how dare they!) are teaching children about the beauty of literature, the lessons of history and the wonders of science. Because, of course, if you’re growing food, you’ll never need a working knowledge of genetics, or if you’re filtering water, you’ll never want to know what pathogens are and how they spread…

Another, similar, meme claims that teachers (oh, how dare they!) are introducing the next generation to algebra or geometry instead of teaching them to fill in tax forms. How terrible to think of children visualising the mathematical properties of the universe when they could be staring at a tax form! 

This is my crazy-lady thing.

Yes, some of us do crazy-lady things, once we hit That Age when for some reason society turns round and allows us to put away the selfie-stick and be ourselves. We become crazy cat ladies, or marvellous jam-makers, or readers of heavy books, or formidable knitters and crocheters.

I am the crazy blackberry lady.
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This is what I do in my free time from summer into autumn. I take long walks through trodden paths and fishing-grounds, looking for bramble-bushes, surveying which berries will likely ripen first.

Scotland, late 2020. Covid-19 and the closure of schools had disrupted education and obliterated the yearly exam schedule. Uptake of online education had proved patchy at best. The government and the education authorities were worried about the effect on social inequalities: that children whose families lacked the technology at access online lessons, would suffer deepening disadvantages as a result.
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So, every child over about age 8 was given an iPad to use at home and at school. Teachers could set classroom tasks and homework digitally, and every child would have the tools to access online lessons if ever schools had to lock down again. The constant day-to-day use of iPads would extend everyone’s IT skills, and what with text-predicting note-taking apps, they would hardly need to write with pens on paper any more… 

It sounded amazing. Expensive, but oh so 21st-century, so technologically advanced, so sci-fi-utopian, pro-equality… for every child would have the same device in their hands. The same learning tool, the same opportunities. 

Yay, it’s Earth Day! Time to talk about Saving the Planet. Let’s have a school assembly or watch a TV programme about recycling. Let’s virtuously switch off an electric light for an hour and congratulate ourselves on our moment of good intent. There, that’s done. What, the kids didn’t understand that bit about plastic pollution? Never mind; we’ll talk about it again next Earth Day, next year.

Earth Day irritates me more and more every year.
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We need to stop buying/binning plastics; we need to reverse environmental degradation, avoid sending animals into extinction. We need to slow down our burning of carbons and get back into harmony with the biology of the planet. We need to change our habits as individuals, and restructure industry and culture so as to reduce human impacts on this biosphere that is keeping us alive. Does Earth Day really do any of this? I don’t think it does. 

But it’s better than nothing, the argument goes.
​I don’t agree. 

Early one Saturday morning, my 11-year-old decided to take cuttings from all our houseplants, replant them in the biggest garden pots he could find, and fill his tiny shared bedroom with greenery. Spider plants, tradescantia and a couple of aloes, all mixed in together and soaked with water, standing on dinner-plates borrowed from the kitchen. His 9-year-old brother woke up later that morning, saw the transformation and thought he was still dreaming a happy dream.

When both your sons actually agree on something, you let it happen if you can. The boys watered their chosen treasures sporadically but generously, and their jungle grew, crowding windowsill and furniture until there was barely room to sleep there. Trailing stems and offshoots wandered around, getting accidentally pruned off when they crossed someone’s pillow or caught on someone’s clothing. 

A few months later I noticed that something had changed. My younger son had stopped coughing. That nasty little cough that used to persist for weeks following every bout of cold or flu… it was gone. 

It was that day in August—the day before school begins. It wasn’t my school, because I’m only a supply teacher, but I went there for the morning to learn about the new Reading & Writing framework. There is always a new Reading & Writing framework, for educational leaders are always either throwing out what works best or berating teachers for not doing what works best.

I had sat on a chair and listened to the woman and I’d “got into groups” and talked with the people and I’d done something on big paper and scribbled in my notebook and I’d checked off my PRD target and now I was headed for the door. The permanent-contract teachers would stay and use the afternoon to arrange their classrooms.
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Ever nosy, I peeked into one classroom after another as I walked down the corridor. 

​I was nine years old and they had decided to teach me to tell the time. There were two hands on a clock face. One of those hands, when it pointed to the number 1, meant 5, they told me. If it pointed to the 2, it meant 10. But if it pointed to the 3, then it meant a quarter. If it pointed to the 9, it was also a quarter, and other numbers jumped around and refused to make sense. I did what any 9-year-old would do when she’s asked if she’s stupid and suddenly she’s not quite sure of the answer: I cried. 

They left me alone for a bit; they would try again the next day. The world back then was full of clock faces, and my eldest sister even owned a wrist-watch. By the time I had finished crying, something clicked, and they had no more trouble with me and the page of clocks in the maths book. 

Oh, wow. An Artificial Intelligence can clump words into sentences.
Paragraphs even. HUMAN AUTHORS ARE ABOUT TO BE REPLACED BY AI CONTENT WRITERS! So say the people I see on Internet and social media. Techies cheerfully predict a new era of copious cheap content. Students hope AI will make writing their term papers easy. Creatives worry that it will end their careers. 
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And every now and then, someone kindly posts on Twitter a little sample of this new product: prose written by AI. A “romance” scene in which two cliched lovers accomplish a “fiery embrace” with their respective lips. An account of a zoo visit stating that the lions are “big and powerful”. Bland, unremarkable sentences pasting obvious adjectives on to predictable nouns riding hackneyed verbs to bald, unsatisfying narratives. Secondhand imagery or none at all. Manufactured metaphors stirred instead of shaken, linked all wrong and clanking like skeletons trying to dance. 

When I was a girl, it would have been nice if my world had been nicer to girls.
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Back then, if you got praised it was for being unobtrusive and doing your domestic chores. For staying inside the box where you belonged. Your mother’s highest compliment was, “Aren’t you a good little housewife!” Punishments were harsh and rewards were demeaning. If you weren’t a pretty child, you’d hear the grown-ups worrying about it. Your father might have been proud of your cleverness in science or spelling, but once you passed age twelve, he kind of lost track of where you were inside your head. 

It takes decades, and dozens of personal battlegrounds, hundreds of social missteps and several thousand miles of riding a motorbike to find another place, to recognize yourself outside the identity assigned to you. Is it wrong to be glad you gave birth to boys and not girls, for fear of subtly, subliminally extending this hereditary chain of mother-daughter disempowerment? For fear that you might not quite know how to parent a girl?