On the next David Attenborough.

Currently, the Comet is using her left hand a lot in her efforts to feed herself. You are entertaining yourself by putting bits of potato in different places, or pointing the loaded teaspoon this way or that to see if she will still go the southpaw route (so far, mostly), but despite the fact that your Mum says that your Brother’s left-handedness was glaring from quite early on, you are not sure if it means anything. It’s very easy to look at a mild preference for … and declare that this clearly shows her future as a …. and at ten months you feel this is a little optimistic. Most likely she’s just gotten used to your right-handed habit of making a lunge for her mouth from her left, in the days when she was still letting you feed her.

The Star, on the other hand, is rising four and a child who most definitely knows his own mind. This is wearying when it leads to regular arguments about whether it is time to stop chasing the pigeons or (in his opinion) not. There are times when you would like to have one of those children who just capitulates to adult demands without demonstrating a fundamental contempt for the concept of the Mama is always right. On the upside, your debating skills are getting a really good workout.

Anyway, it occurred to you the other day that the Star has been fascinated with animals and related concepts for long enough now that it  is shaping up nicely to be a genuinely enduring obsession, rather than just a passing phase. I mean, sure, he went though cars and trains and, well, that was about it because then he got onto bugs and sharks and frankly he’s never looked back. It’s been the natural world from then on in, albeit a new subsection of it every few months. It’s hard to keep up, because he simply adds a new species to the pantheon rather than dropping previous enthusiasms completely, but you think birds are edging it from dinosaurs* these days.

You hadn’t realised how marked his preference was until you bought a set of picture encyclopaedias from a car boot sale on the grounds that while the Star enjoys a good story and another one and one more and oh go on Mama read me this too, he has also shown a certain appetite for factual books. When you got home, you upended them in the living room and the Star dived into them excitedly. Yet very soon it was very apparent that all encyclopaedias are not created equal. Because the Star divided the books into the ones about mammals, birds, insects, dinosaurs and sea life, which he wanted to read, and the ones about science, history, geography, farming and, shock horror, transport, which he didn’t, and though the books sit on a Star accessible shelf and the favoured ones are pulled down frequently, the others remained shunned to this day. You are still slightly surprised by how adamantly he sticks to his guns on this. Although he did let you buy a book on castles the other day and has pulled that out of the reading pile quite regularly since, so perhaps it is time to insist on looking through the one on agriculture or something again. Probably not though, as what he seemed most interested in wasn’t the knights but spotting all the dogs in the pictures.

Thing is, if this is the beginning of a truly lifelong passion, you are wondering if perhaps you should start pursuing it with him more.

Tricky. Animals have always left you a bit cold to be honest. But you feel the books are a good starting point. Also, thank goodness for libraries. You have learned more in the last year about the natural world than in your previous thirty *cough* summers due to the non-fiction section of the local children’s library, and you are pretty sure the Star has internalised more.**

You are also becoming accustomed to spending days out at animal-themed attractions. Parks will do, of course. What with the squirrels, the pigeons, the bees, wasps, butterflies, snails, worms, other assorted bugs and caterpillars, the pigeons, the dogs, the parrots, the starlings, the many varieties of ducks, the geese and the swans, the moorhens, the coots, the herons, the pigeons, the rats, the mice and the pigeons there is quite a lot of wildlife action going on. Still, this is London and there is also a profusion of zoos, safari parks, open farms, bird sanctuaries, aquariums and, if all else fails, the Natural History Museum within easy striking distance, so many places in fact, that if you visit one a month by the time you get back to the top of the list, that place will still be fresh and exciting. For both of you.

And then there is the issue of pets. After the Star renewed his quest to hug every mutt in London, following a brief hiatus when he realised that dogs have teeth, you have also been encouraging him to ask Granny and Grandad when they are going to get a dog. Rather them than you, is what you say. At least with children, you eventually get to stop picking up their poo.

You, however, are more inclined to think the Star might be getting some fish for his birthday.

As well as this. Mind you, you draw the line at having to sit though episodes of Countryfile.  But you might be persuaded to take the Star to the Imax at the Science Museum next time you and B get a yen to go to the cinema.

But the educator in you is vaguely worried that you should be doing something a bit more purposeful than just letting the Star’s whimsy stuff his brain full of whatever animal facts he comes across that happen to take his fancy (“Penguins have spiky tongues, Mama!”). In fact, the educator in you is having difficulty in restraining herself from drawing up some kind of biologically focused pre-schooler scheme of work. This month we will look at life-cycles!

Question is, would this kill his interest absolutely dead and if not, what should you be doing?

Answers on a postcard please.

*You are not at all sure that the Star grasps that dinosaurs do not, as such, exist in the modern world. You suspect he thinks they just live far far away. Under these circumstances, dinosaurs definitely count.

**Unless you are talking about evolution. You are still looking for a Star-freindly explanation. Anyone? Anyone at all?

On the Voyage of the Beagle.

B’s problem with dinosaurs is that at the moment every book he picks up when he wants to read to the Star contains pictures of snarling teeth devouring smaller, cuter animals and he is having difficulty finding euphemisms to explain it.

But the Star is completely animal, insect* and fish** mad and it is impossible to avoid the topic of what they, let alone dinosaurs, eat completely. You tend to wince and say  ’I expect that rabbit is having a sleep’ when you get to that bit. It’s hard to look a three-year old in the face and say, yes, that owl is eating that mouse, look at that blood splatter, imagine the crunch of its delicate little bones as you peruse the encyclopaedia, when not five minutes before you were reading a story about a kind-hearted hamster in a tutu and his best friend the cat in a bowler hat. The kind-hearted talking hamster no less.

That said, it’s probably you and B who are the sensitive ones. It does not seem to bother the Star in the slightest. He cheerfully lists all the animals a lion might be expected to chomp on and many that are improbable, and his eyes light up when he finds a picture of a fox bearing down on an unsuspecting gaggle of chickens. One of his favourite things is to bounce up to the fish counter in the supermarket, point to the most fishy looking fish there and say ‘I eat fish!’ He is even sanguine about the possibility of personal danger. ‘That dinosaur eat me up?’ he asks with relish every time we come across a T-rex.

In fact, the only thing he seems a bit upset about is when it’s insects getting savaged.

The Star really really likes his bug-friends.*** He has a particular downer on spiders for this reason.

This is not B’s only objection to dinosaurs, however. He feels that the Star is putting a lot of effort into learning some really useless facts. He came to this conclusion after the Star had taken him through the latest library book and accurately named all the terrible lizards, and told him about how sauropods swallowed stones.****

You feel B has a point there. The Star would be much better off learning to recognise formula one cars.*****

But your main objection to the dinosaur phase is that it leads you to have to explain evolution over breakfast.

Well there was this timeline picture in the book, showing how we went from microbes to human beings, with a detour via the dinosaurs and you were unwise enough to read the text which went with it. 42 whys later and the Star was frankly disbelieving whilst you had given up. The Star has, after all, only just grasped the concept of the past, which he refers to as ‘last night’ regardless of when it actually happened. The concept of deep time is beyond him.You are almost certainly lucky that he doesn’t think the dinosaurs are, in fact, Transformers in disguise.

At which point you also realised that the problem with creationism is that it makes a far better picture book.

The devil has the best stories.

*Also, related organisms like spiders. Do not get pedantic.

**And crabs. Yes, you know they aren’t fish. Whatever.

***It’s really time to get him a dog, isn’t it?

****Because they didn’t have proper teeth so needed a bit of extra help to grind up the leaves they ate. See, you are learning something too.

*****This weekend, your MiL taught the Star to read ‘baba’ (or rather ‘баба’) and you taught the Star to pick out a Red Bull Formula One car from the others. So so proud.

On education, education, education and sacrifice.

Since the Star has now turned three, he is eligible for the 15 hours of nursery provision the UK provides, and you could be enjoying blissful toddler free afternoons.

You aren’t.

The Star did, in fact, get a place at the nursery of your choice. The one where they don’t just follow the children around and attempt to get the to count the fish as a nod towards numeracy teaching if he shows a fleeting interest in the aquarium, but actually collar a few kids at a time and spend a short time with a bit of structured learning each day.

You don’t have much time for ‘dogme’ in your profession, so you don’t see why you should support something similar when it comes to your children. ‘Dogme’ rose from Scott Thornbury’s attack on handout driven lessons. You think that a teacher who doesn’t know how to use resources properly is the last person to have the skills to go it alone. You don’t doubt that this kind of student led learning can be done, but only by the most skilled, and even then it is your professional opinion that making it up as you go along is not as successful as a teaching strategy as actually giving it some thought in advance. Although you are also undoubtedly against photocopying a badly designed worksheet as a substitute for actual preparation.

Not that you are opposed to a bit of impromptu teaching, of course.

So, you were satisfied with the school.

The problem was that even though you had booked the Star in for the afternoon session at the nursery and the Star’s Russian playgroup slash language lessons are in the morning, the fact that they are at the opposite ends of South London meant that the clashed horribly and on Tuesdays and Thursdays he wouldn’t make it to the school anything like on time. Plus, if you are honest, you didn’t really fancy plunging the Star into a monolingual English environment for the full five days a week.

You went down fighting. You spoke to his (bi-lingual in Portuguese and English) teacher. You officially requested that the Star be let off Tuesdays and Thursdays to further the bilingual and bi-cultural diversity of his individually tailored diffentationalised syllabus. The (bi-cultural but regretting not being bi-lingual in Norwegian and English) Headmaster himself phoned you up to chat about it.

Both were sympathetic.

But his absences would mess up the school’s official absence stats and that in turn would have an impact on their standings in the school league tables*, and so you had to choose.

Choose to send your child to the excellent local school you hope to get him into when the time comes for compulsory education and enjoy afternoons of sitting, feet up, in front of the TV watching property programmes** and feeding the Comet without the distraction of a toddler demanding attention to contend with. But tip the precarious balance you have gained between English and Russian firmly away from Russian.

Or continue to slog through London traffic for an hour twice a week and have to provide the Star with opportunities to get messy, explore the world and learn maths in the afternoons yourself. But manage to keep a reasonable amount of Russian input in your child’s life.

No contest really.

*You don’t blame the school, you blame The System.

** This is a joke. You don’t watch property programmes in the afternoon. No, in the afternoon it’s mostly antique shows.

On the silent period.

You have a bit of a love/ hate relationship with a man named Stephen Krashen.

Not that he knows you exist, mind. He’s a luminary in the field of research into language acquisition*, although his entire body of work seems to consist of him stating the bleeding obvious and then giving it a seriously researched kind of name, preferably accompanied by a nice, completely unprovable, formula and being hailed as a visionary**.

To be fair, when he started out he was battling against the prevailing language teaching method called audiolingualism. Based on behaviorism, it was a pedagogical style a bit like training a dog not to shit on the carpet. A student makes a mistake with cohesive devices, has his nose thoroughly rubbed in it, listens to a lot of Beethoven, and eventually becomes too traumatised ever to use ‘however’ to join two ideas in one sentence ever again.

Krashen’s big revelation was to point out that, as we learn much better if we are feeling happy, motivated, confident and anxiety-free, some aspects of this approach might not be terribly efficient.

Of course, Krashen also called it ‘the affective filter hypothesis’. Much to your irritation, it’s a phrase that seems to have made its way straight to the hindbrain of the EFL profession and stuck there.

But just because you have a proper cynical bristle at any claims that being pleasant, especially pleasantness given a special name, is the key to saving the planet, doesn’t necessarily make the claims wrong. The reason why he irritates you so much is that you agree with him about almost everything, you just don’t like having to use the phrase ‘comprehensible input’ before anyone else will agree about the importance of grading your language when talking to students of a second language.

That said, you’ve always been suspicious of his ideas about the ‘silent period’ (TM) in language acquisition***.

You once watched a very amusing video of him explaining this theory. The way he tells it, the entire idea came about as a result of him being unable to get his (Japanese?) neighbours’ kids to produce any words in English for months and months and months and months, despite being on the receiving end of his expertise as a non-teacher-of but thinker-in-depth-about language.

Yet finally they did speak! And it was as if a flood barrier had opened and lo, Stephen did behold that before we are ready to communicate we need to spend a certain amount of time listening to and understanding language first. He recommends that students are not pushed into using the target language in classrooms but that art should mirror real life and they should be allowed to acquire language naturally. Just like babies do in their first language.

Now normally you hesitate to use yourself as an example of how people learn languages because in fact you don’t. Learn languages that is. Or even acquire them. In fact, you especially don’t acquire them. You spent ten months listen to Russian the first time round and didn’t pick up a word. You sent seven more years there and still can’t hold your own in conversation. The times when your Russian made any ground was, in fact, the times when you were being forced to actually use the bloody language, which is why your domestic Russian is much better than anything else, including, occasionally, English, thanks to your non-English speaking MiL.

It’s also why children, any children, don’t learn to speak by watching TV. The input can be as comprehensible as you like, but there’s no interaction, no struggle for communication and ultimately, no acquisition. As the BabyEinsteiners found out to their cost. In your opinion, the reason why babies spend so long listening to the language before producing it has more to do with physical ability to produce, combined with a certain mental immaturity. Look at the success of baby signing, for example. Give him the tools to use language before his lips are able to co-ordinate with his tongue and he will take that opportunity. He’s not waiting around for any other reason.

Of course, this one of Krashen’s theories isn’t at all where your profession is now. Now you’re all about the task-based learning. Learning to communicate through having a go at it, being given feedback on a performance and then going again. Forcing the buggers to interact, in effect.

But you are up close and personal to a case of the silent period in action at the moment because the Star is being stubborn about producing his first word.

Or at least, a word that he uses more than once, in an appropriate context, without excessive prompting.

You aren’t too bothered. It’s clear he understands. He’ll point at things you ask him to. He’ll point at things Papa asks him to. He’ll bring you a book when you suggest it. He’ll even put them away when Babushka gives the command.

So you suspect he’s being excessively noncommittal because he is being brought up bilingually.

‘There’s a train!’ shouts Mummy, gleefully. ‘A train!’

‘Poezd,’ says Babushka, a few minutes later. ‘Smotri poezd!’

‘Duck!’ Mummy points out. ‘Ducky duck duck!’

‘Utka!’ Babushka exclaims. ‘Uty uty utka!’

‘Helicopter!’ yells Mummy, gesturing madly. ‘It’s a helicopter!’

‘Vertalot! challenges Babushka. ‘Eta vertalot!’

The Star therefore has wisely come to a compromise. He makes noises which both Mummy and Babushka agree on.

Anything on wheels is now greeted by ‘toot toot!’ Dogs are growled at, cows**** receive something approximating a moo, and he caws when he sees a crow. All things he has been taught, mainly by his Babushka, who is excellent at coming up with toddler friendly sounds.

Still, you will be relieved when you can get onto the next stage of his language development proper.

Teaching him the correct use of the word ‘however’. Naturally.

And now for something completely related:

Tom: The soup is cold, Mommy.
Mommy: Tom, you never spoke before!
Tom: The soup was never cold before.

*He’s also, you gather, a bit of an activist in the war zone of bilingual education.

**Of course, it’s easy to dis the inventor of sliced bread now.

***Sadly, ‘language acquisition’ is another phrase Krashen has patented.

****In pictures. This is central London.

On a Really Goode Job.

You are supposed to be job hunting at the moment but you are putting it off. Or rather Putting It Off, the capitals being entirely justified by the lengths to which you will go to avoid it.

This is partly because the wonderful world of state school teaching seems oddly uninterested in you. Surely they are not taking onto account such small matters as the fact that your degree was 15 years ago and you’ve been teaching the wrong subject ever since. So you have too much teaching and, worse, management experience for a newbie. And now you’ve also had a year off after completing your initial training.

Still, it’s a bit deflating.

But you could cope with the damage the ringing silence in the face of your application (sorry, ‘applications’)is doing to your ego, if it weren’t for the thrice dammed bleeping application forms.

Applying for state school teaching is, essentially, applying for the same job with the same employer. Over and over again.

Yet every single school has a different form.

You assume this is because they like to think that every school has slightly different needs and so requires slightly different information.

But they don’t. On the form, they ask for exactly the same information, albeit laid out in a slightly different way each time. Presumably to foil your attempts to cut and paste.

Admittedly this differs a bit from a standard CV in that they want full work histories (in reverse chronological order) for example. This is supposed to protect them from undesirable elements.

But the same effect, surely, could be gained by specifying what they want to see on a CV?

You do not consider the fact that some schools want the full addresses of the places you’ve worked and some don’t sufficient excuse for making you spend hours you don’t have wrestling with what are frequently very badly designed Word documents.

Particularly as they also want exceptionally long cover letters to accompany them, which is where the actual tailoring your presentation to the job part comes in.

Luckily, if you just ignore it for a few months more, the entire problem will become irrelevant as the new term will have started and that’s that career move up the swanny. Probably.

Anyway, you are feeling particularly impressed by Max of Celluloid Blonde, who has managed to find a job with a company called Murphy-Goode where the application process eschews pointless busywork in favour of making the candidates produce a video clip.

Which people then vote on. (That’s important).

Shockingly, this actually has some relevance to the position at hand.

Now there’s a company to work for. The fact it involves becoming intimately acquainted with a winery has nothing to do with it.

Anyway, since the company seems to have an original approach, it’s entirely appropriate that Max’s clip is the most original there. So watch the video, vote for it, and complete the email which makes the vote count. Do it soon, as they are about to cut the applicants down to the most popular 50.

And while there, admire the backing track, ‘cos it’s really cool.

On Baby Bliss.

The other particularly helpful baby book Best Friend gave you was supposed to be an antidote to Gina Ford’s regimentation being the key to happiness. Harvey “I’m a doctor donchaknow” Karp’s Baby Bliss.

Unlike Ms Ford’s stick to the schedule first and think later approach, Dr Karp has a Theory about the first three months of a baby’s life. And this Theory leads him to make certain recommendations about the Best Way to calm that crying newborn.

Now, you are generally suspicious of people with Theories. Especially Theories which lead to statements about the Best Way to do things. That sort of thinking has been behind claims that it is impossible to learn a foreign language unless one is simultaneously listening to a piece of music by Bach.* That one can only learn a foreign language if it is presented as a command, which one then follows.** That a teacher should rarely, if at all, speak, but instead should point to a large colourful chart representing different phonemes.***

Dr Karp’s Theory is that human babies are born three months too soon. Because their big brains need big heads but big heads wouldn’t make it through the pelvises of human mothers and so evolution has selected for, essentially, a species of preemies. For babies to be contented and comforted in those first three months then, they need to be made to feel as though they are still happily swimming about in the womb.

Apart from the truth universally, you gather, acknowledged that babies do suddenly switch on at around 12 weeks, he brings to the table the evidence of the helplessness that human babies display at birth compared to other animals.

You had to go away and have a cup of tea when you read that. Because otherwise you would have found yourself pointing out that even you, the 8 month pregnant ignoramus that you were, knew that babies rarely walked, or even flew, within minutes or even weeks of attaining their three month birthday. Hunting and killing are also, you rather assumed, a way off too.

The idea that recreating womblike conditions might help calm a newborn had a certain amount of common sense appeal, though.

And at three o’clock in the morning, when it is your third day at home and your husband is snoring away in the living room and the Star is fussing and fuming and refusing to go back to sleep, you will try anything, and that is when you turned to the practical help section of the book.

The Baby Bliss Method, then, consists of following the 5 Ss:

1. Swaddling, much to your six months pregnant surprise. “My MiL,” you said, gloomily “is probably going to insist on doing dreadful 19thCentury things to the baby. Like swaddling.” “Oh,” said Best Friend, “actually, swaddling is really in again now.”

And to be fair, MiL has been discovered to be a fount of extremely helpful and not at all archaic wisdom throughout the last 12 months. Or she has bitten her tongue right off while watching you manhandle the infant. Sometimes, probably, both. Which shows what you know.

Anyway, you swaddled the Star right up until he was six months in increasingly large cotton sheet type cloths. Theoretically, six months was a bit long, especially as he was well capable of unswaddling himself in the middle of the night at that point. Still, since when you tried not swaddling him, or swaddling him under the arms (which rather defeats the object of the exercise, you would have thought), he would wake up again half an hour later, you decided to go with the flow.

2. Side (or Stomach). Obviously putting babies to sleep in this position is a big no no, but carrying them around face down while trying to get them to stop grizzling is another matter.

3. Ssssshhhhhhh. The trick here is to be unafraid in public places of looking a bit of an idiot. Because in following this one you did find yourself sitting on the bus with your lips right against the Star’s ear hissing loudly and constantly at him until he stopped whimpering.

Worked like a dream every single time though.

You also had a radio detuned to produce white noise, which played, much to B’s dismay, through the night. Tailor made white noise machines do exist, apparently, as do CDs which produce vacuum cleaner sounds, whale music and back to the womb special effects. Still, you were happy with the radio, although the frequency you had it on did tend to occasionally pick up the transmissions made by the helicopter pilots to the helipad round the corner, which is an interesting way to be woken up at 6am.

Actually, you ran this one for about six months too. The thing is, while the Star no longer needed the reassurance, you do live in a big city and you rather suspected that the white noise drowned out the other noises of late night partying, ambulance sirens, fireworks, drunks stumbling home at 12pm, the downstairs neighbour and his hound of the Baskerville, fire engine sirens, the boys playing cricket in the street in the late afternoon and the others racing the mopeds later on, police sirens and the occasional scream as another teen got stabbed.

4. Swinging. Or jiggling. Why babies cannot be soothed from a comfortable sitting position has always been beyond you.

5. Sucking. Actually, you’d forgotten this one, because you never did like the idea of using a dummy. The Star was a very sucky little baby though. When he wasn’t spending hours and hours and hours nuzzling your breasts, he was making his own arrangements and actually giving himself bruises by latching on to his arms for comfort. Freaked the hell out of you when purple marks appeared until you caught him giving lovebites you your husband (the non milk filled parental unit).

Perhaps, with hindsight, a dummy would have been better.

To be fair, the Star was never a particularly difficult or colicky baby, and perhaps all of these little tricks were just the boost your confidence needed to feel in control, and everybody knows how well dumb animals respond to people who project an aura of authority.

But you don’t know where you’d have been without the book. You suspect it would have been a gibbering heap sucking its thumb in the corner.

 

* Suggestopedia. Bach, or at least some Bach, has the same rhythm as your heartbeat, you see.

** Total Physical Response. Which is OK for imperatives like ‘Stand up’ or ‘Sit down’ but does present some challenges, you’d imagine, when it is time to fool around with the third conditional.

*** The Silent Way. Of course, this was how you were introduced to cuisenaire rods. You adore cuisenaire rods.

On the fear of fur coats.

How long did it take you to start seeing the Star as something of a research project?

Four and a half months.

Which is how long it was before he jerked you from the edge of sleep into fully awake one morning by lying in his cot and burbling ‘Dada’. And ‘Dadee’.

Oh perfidious Star.

Although it wasn’t the actual words that caught your attention, but that he had produced the ‘d’ sound for the first time in response to the fact that your Mother in Law had been chanting ‘Die die die’ at him pretty constantly since she had arrived a few days earlier.

Because it means ‘Give me’ in Russian, yeah?

Previous to this, you hadn’t considered that you could actually influence the Star in his acquisition of baby talk.

Now, however, you were inspired to have a shifty as the International Phonemic Chart to see which sounds you could get him to say next.

The IPA is a way to describe all sounds that exist in all languages. You can see the (Southern) British subset here.

But the full pulmonic* consonant chart is below and there we can clearly see which sounds are going to be closest together in terms of where they are made in the mouth.

So far, the Star can do ‘g’, which he’s been gurgling for a while, and now ‘d’. Which should more properly be rendered /g/ and /d/ to show the sound rather than the letter but… oh, gosh, just follow the link above, or, if anyone fancies seeing how /G/ is different to /g/, then look at this one.

So you are putting your money on his next utterances sounding like /k/ or /t/. With an outside bet on /b/ since so far he has been working his way from right to left along the plosive** line.

And you’ll accept any little flutters anyone else wants to have too, although bear in mind that you reserve the right to chant ‘toast’ at the Star for three days straight in order to influence the outcome.

Update: you have found the versions of the chart for English and Russian now, so here they are…

…for English (from here):

…and for Russian (from here):

Although frankly, this article on Wikipedia makes you want to run away screaming from the whole topic.

*No, you don’t know what that means either.

**You do know what this means, however. Ditto ‘bilabial’, ‘fricative’ and ‘tap’. Jargon’s a wonderful thing.

On character assassination.

One of the side effects of being a teacher is that you often find yourself musing on what makes your students tick.

Well, perhaps ‘side effect’ is the wrong phrase. ‘Secret guilty pleasure’ bordering on ’the main reason why you do it’ is probably closer to the mark.

Generally this focuses on what they are like as learners so that you can manipulate them into doing what you want in the classroom, but occasionally, when someone is being particularly dense about learning, you have a lot of free time on your hands or you are simply interested enough, you find yourself going beyond this and attempting to dissect their manners, morals, standards of cleanliness and inexplicable fondness for Barry Manilow. You try to restrain yourself from telling the subject your conclusions though and when you catch yourself idly doing it in real life, you usually have stern words with yourself afterwards.

So submitting yourself for training is always worrying as you are fully aware it is like giving people like you a licence to rootle around in your head. Still, it was disconcerting to discover at your first tutorial of your PGCE course that your University tutor had got you accurately pegged as someone who adores theory and has to be reminded to focus on the practice. It wasn’t the judgement, with which you entirely concur, which took you aback, but the swiftness with which she reached it. You were extremely impressed.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in your final observed lesson of the course which will turn you into a fully fledged Secondary school teacher, your other University tutor also comented on your character.

Well, first he said that you were operating at a conceptual level which few people reach at this stage in their career. You felt extremely smug about this for at least ten minutes, until you remembered that you have ten years teaching experience and infinite amounts of professional development on all of the other trainees on your course.

Anyway, the problem with him trying to guage your personality is that you appear to have reached that stage of pregnancy where all adreneline is being severly repressed and you are sailing serenely though life in a cocoon of squishy marshmallow.

Except for the emotional outbreaks over the colour of the wind, the direction of your breakfast cereal, the smell of your students’ mobiles, and the sound of the book of the person next to you on the bus, of course.

Unfortunately, this urge was coming into direct conflict with the need to get out the whip and chair and beat the unruly teenagers in year nine into submission. You hadn’t, however, realised quite what a profound effect it was having on you until this tutor started talking about your ‘gentle and consensus seeking nature’.

You nearly fell off your chair in shock. When you told former colleagues, friends and your family about this later, they did actually fall off their chairs in shock. Except the husband, who just laughed uncontrollably for a number of minutes, and pointed to the pile of broken plates that littered the kitchen floor after you had suddenly discovered that the teatowl was hanging an inch to the wrong side of left.

Of course, this chap may have been influenced by the way you damply dripped on him before the lesson and requested that you get to finish the teaching practice a week early due to pregnancy induced energy failure. A strategy which was a spectacular success, by the way, and the reason why you are sitting in your pajamas in front of your laptop rather than attempting to convey the significance of the Watergate scandal to a bunch of mystified GCSE students.

It’s been a bit of a fraught pregnancy week all round, to tell the truth. There was the pre-eclampsia scare later on that day, for example, which was not helped by the fact that you made the mistake of getting on a commuter train where none of the young upwardly mobile types in suits got up for you on a twenty minute train journey on your way home.

And then your antenatal classes started, which has brought the whole 20 hours of labour thing into the realms of the real rather than the hypothetical, particularly when they got the toy doll out and started showing you how the contractions will (really very slowly indeed) screw the Star out through your pelvis. You are now attempting to lean forward wherever possible in an attempt to get the Star to engage in the correct birthing position, which is a bit pants when you have just been handed a ticket to lie around in bed all day by the University.

Most irritating is that you have finally succumbed to an actual pregnancy ailment, carpal tunnel syndrome, which has left the fourth and fifth fingers on your right hand virtually unusable. Luckily this does not affect your typing as you have always attempted to go as fast as you can with the hunt and peck method rather than actually learn how to touch type.

Still, not long to go now.

Better get on with the essays you really need to get finished before your waters break, then… 

On korrect speling.

When you were about nine years old you were extracted from the classes that everyone else was attending in order to do extra nature study.

It was one of those half arsed efforts schools make sometimes towards catering for ‘gifted’ children, the quotation marks there being entirely justified as the lesson you were lifted out of on the grounds that you were too good for it was the spelling class.

You spent the next twelve years being told by successive teachers that your spelling was appalling.

It wasn’t until you were actually a trainee on the course you now tutor on yourself that someone actually bothered to tell you which words you were misspelling though. Thanks to the fact that your essays came back with all the mistakes neatly underlined in green pen you discovered that it wasn’t (just) those long and complicated terms you had been dutifully looking up for all those years, but pretty much every fifth word.

Incidentally, you would just like to point out how difficult it is to find things in the dictionary if you don’t know how to spell them in the first place. Who knew ‘exercise’ began ‘exe’ and not ‘exc’, for example? The time you wasted on that long ago day when you were checking those errors because you had to go through the whole of the ‘e’ section to track that one word down has been indelibly burned on your memory.

And that’s assuming you’ve got the first letter right, which, trust me, is not something anyone should assume about your spelling.

Now, of course, the boot is on the other foot and you are the one driven to incandescent rage by the innaccuracies of your native speaker trainees.

So you do have a certain amount of sympathy for Dr Bernard Lamb of Imperial College, London, who has become so irritated by having to mark page after page of badly spelt essays that he has written a book about the mistakes his students have made. People have been handing you clippings about it – can’t imagine why – and you even caught a delightful little slot on BBC Breakfast news last week where he and another expert were slugging it out on the topic.

The thing about spelling – and punctuation for that matter – is that it does seem to bring out the raging pedant in people. Well, bad spelling brings him out in other people. You tend to get in touch with your inner disgusted of Tunbridge Wells over misplaced commas and the misuse of the word ‘however’.

Now, let’s be honest, this is rarely about people genuinely misinterpreting what has been said because the spelling, or even the punctuation is wrong.

Sure, there are lots of pithy little examples you could give to show how different punctuation – or even spelling slips – can radically alter the meaning, but these are always isolated sentences. What people should remember is that that’s not how they would be reading them in real life. The context almost always allows people to figure out what was meant.

It does slow them down, though. And this is what people seem to lose sight of when it comes to the debate about good spelling.

The point is, good spelling in and of itself is not a virtue. But it does help people process your text with the minimum of effort possible.

Punctuation too is not there – nowadays – to tell you how to phrase the text when reading aloud. Commas, for example, do not… do not – this is one of your pet hates – ‘tell people where to breathe’. The only texts we read out loud now are bedtime stories to kids, the religious book in the religious establishment of our choice, or, and you find this particularly unhelpful, whatever book the literature class is ploughing though in school.

Good punctuation, therefore, is there to help the eyes take the right route through the text, and occasionally, if anyone ever uses a semicolon correctly, show the brain the connection between ideas.

Reading is a silent and individual activity. All those moving their lips are not doing it properly.

Layout, of course, is also helpful here. Count the number of sentences that go to make up a paragraph in a text designed to be read on screen compared to one designed to be read in a more traditional format. The better ones have much shorter paragraphs, and quite short sentences. Much like newspapers.

It’s to take the strain off the reader because if other people are anything like you, reading off a monitor is considerably more laborious than reading off a page. Newspapers, of course, just want the whole experience to be as pain free and exciting as possible. One sentence paragraphs therefore abound, and this is good. For that context.

So badly spelt, punctuated or laid out texts are annoying because they trip you up. You are spilled out of the act of smoothly navigating through the mass of wriggly symbols and forced to spend extra time regrouping the words yourself so they make sense, mentally rearranging the letters so they are now in the right order, or lying down in a darkened room for half an our to stop the migraine from striking.

 And, quite understandably, this is infuriating if it happens too often.

Now fair enough, but you don’t think the effortlessly good spellers of this world realise what a trial it is to get it right for those who don’t have any kind of feel for the right combination of letters at all.

You’ve spent the last ten years noting down your misspellings. Spellcheckers are enormously helpful here. You’ve worked out your habitual errors you’ve learned as many rules as you can to help you.

There are a lot.

Take trying to work out when to use double letters.

Don’t, please, trot out that old chestnut about double consonants showing short vowel sounds rather than long ones (‘rapped’ vs ‘raped’ as Dr Shaw so amusingly put it on Breakfast). It’s following that kind of logic that has had you spelling ‘apologise’ with two ‘p’s all these years. As for vowels, since ‘lose’ is a long vowel sound and the same as ‘choose’, and ‘loose is a short vowel sound and not the same as ‘chose’, you can be forgiven for perennially getting the two confused. In your opinion.

There are, it has to be said, lots of fairly fixed patterns when it comes to doubling a letter when adding a suffix to the base word (‘hot’ to ’hotter’ and ‘occur’ to ‘occurred’, ‘travel’ to ‘travelling’ and so on) and this has significantly improved the quality of your life.

But then many words just defy reason altogether. You were entirely in agreement with Dr Shaw’s Breakfast opponent, Masha Bell, a woman who seems to have dedicated her life to trying to explain spelling to people, who said that being of a logical bent did not help when it comes to spelling.

Of course, you would take this further and say that if you are bad at spelling, you must be very logical. This entirely justifies the fact that ever since you discovered that ‘acknowledge begins ‘ack’ not ‘ak’ you have been having to forcible restrain yourself from writing ‘chunk’ as ‘chunk’ and not ‘chunck’, with very little success.

And in any case there’s nothing much you can do at all about words ending ‘ent’ or ‘ant’ or ‘ence’ or ‘ance’, ‘er’ or ‘or’ or in the case of ‘grammar’, ‘ar’. Unstressed and so sounding exactly the bloody same as each other, so no kind of rules apply at all. Whaddayamean, learn them all off by heart? Do you know how many brain cells that wastes? Why can’t we just choose one and stick to it?

So you do make a distinction between when it is important to get it right and when it isn’t, and it should surprise no one that you are incredibly intolerant of anyone who claims to have problems with spelling who can’t do the same.

And just so everyone knows, here are your guidelines.

Anything which is permanent, which you actually want people to read carefully, or which you want to impress someone with should be checked to within an inch of its life. And if it means looking up every word on your increasingly long list of problem areas to make sure it’s right, then so be it. This applies to academic essays, blog entries, emails to prospective employers as well as the more obvious CV, professional correspondence generally, and boardwork for students to copy down.

In fact, it’s nothing to do with problems with spelling; it’s simply a matter of sharpening up proof reading skills. Or, in fact, proof reading at all.

Frankly, since most of people’s permanent writing is, or can be, word processed these days, there really isn’t much excuse for not getting it mostly right. The software might not help with the there/ their/ they’re conundrum, and have an inexplicable hatred for your use of ‘which’ and ‘who’ in defining relative clauses, but it can certainly earn its keep by pointing out where you’ve got ‘perennially’, ‘incandescent’ and ‘enormously’ wrong.

And as for the rest, a tip. Reading from the end of the line to the beginning helps. It removes the focus from content to form.

However, considering how much effort this takes, anything which is impermanent, where you might be able to rely on people liking you enough to overlook five typos in as many lines, where you are just trying to drop a quick note on your way out of the door to let someone know where you’re all going for a drink that evening, or when you are trying to reply to someone by email before your internet connection goes down again – gutted you were, when that excuse ran out with your acquisition of broadband…

… well, you can’t justify the five point blood pressure rise and the years off your life it would take to get it right.

On Rochester.

On your return from Margate you stopped off in Rochester. Which turned out to be a very literary visit.

Ever since you had sailed through it on your way to the seaside, the name had been rolling around in your head and bugging you. You couldn’t remember why the place was so familiar when the sight of a cathedral and castle looming towards you as you whizzed by on the train had come as quite a shock. It wasn’t until half way round the actual town itself that you realised this was because you were thinking of ‘Mr Rochester’. As in Jane Eyre. Nice to get that one cleared up, but a bit of a let down all told.

One of Rochester’s claims to fame is that it has the second largest cathedral in the UK. You were impressed by the school party who were getting to stand in a circle in black monks cowls and listen to chanting in the crypt.

 But really people go to Rochester because it’s Dickens country. He grew up in the (next) town.

This, of course, means that every shop in the quaint High Street – “You won’t find any big chains in our city”- is obliged to make some kind of reference to a character from one of Dickens’ books. With extra points if they can turn it into a punne (or play on words).

You also saw many houses which feature in the books themselves. Especially Great Expectations, which is set in the area, apparently. You would undoubtedly have been more excited about this if you had read more than one of the novels less than fifteen years ago.

You were quite amused to discover that Dickens’ hitherto inexplicable fondness for outlandish character names has suddenly been made splicable though.

While trundling round the local museum you discovered that one of the leading lights in local politics and community benefacting from the previous century was called Sir Cloudesley Shovell.

                                                     

And you suddenly realised that Dickens obviously spent his whole literary career trying to improve on perfection.

And failing.