School Days Sophia Waugh

Sometimes the easiest ideas are the hardest to teach. Which is why, as I prepare to go back to school after the break, I find myself obsessing about the very basics of writing – paragraphing, apostrophes, the bricks and mortar of our written communication.

If, as they say, I had a pound for every time I heard a child say, ‘Do I have to use paragraphs?’, I would probably not be fretting about teaching when to use them. Children of every age – right up to GCSE and probably further – ask this question with big, eager eyes and then look hurt when I snap, ‘Yes! Always!’

Even worse is when they come back with ‘But you said this question isn’t marked for spag [spelling, punctuation and grammar], so why does it matter?’

For years, teachers have moaned about teaching to exams, and this response is absolute proof of its evil. If I’m not being marked for punctuation, why should I bother? If I’m going to be a chartered accountant/soldier/nurse/ barista, I’m not going to need it. It honestly makes me want to weep.

One of the perils of teaching to exams is that the children see the qualification as an end in itself. If that’s the view you’re taking, I suppose that’s fair enough, but what is increasingly hard to make children understand is the wider good that an education can bring you. You may not enjoy Emily Dickinson’s poetry or The Lord of the Flies, but being able to read, understand and think about them will hold you in good stead for understanding and thinking about life in general.

Some children write a whole piece and then go back and ‘put punctuation in’. They cannot understand why this just doesn’t work, even if you speak a whole, unbroken-up river of prose at them and ask them to understand it. Actually, that’s very hard to do – try it and see.

We secondary-school teachers would argue that it is up to the primary schools to get the children into the right habits before we even see them, and of course we are basically in the right. But you would be amazed how many teachers, thinking this, do not pick up on basic errors. With any essay-based subject, teachers should mark spelling and punctuation as automatically as they mark the mistakes in dates or treaty titles in history. But they often don’t. Why not?

It’s simple, and very sad. There is a generation (which includes teachers) that cannot spell or punctuate; so how can those people pick up mistakes? We laugh, rudely enough, at the mistakes PE teachers make on emails and notices but, alas, they are not the only ones. ‘Will the teacher’s of John Smith please be aware he has a broken foot.’ This is the sort of email I receive – from other teachers – on a daily basis.

I once, enraged, went up and down the school corridors with a marker pen, putting in missing apostrophes on every sign: ‘Girls’ toilets’ etc. But I have not quite dared point out the mistakes to the teachers themselves.

Am I a pedant? Yes, I suppose I am. But why? Because it matters. Because writing is about communication, and if you can’t punctuate, you are, without doubt, getting in the way of the understanding of your readers.

So I will continue to bang on about apostrophes and paragraphs to anyone who will listen. Luckily for me, a hundred children a day have to, whether they want to or not.