Schoolboy error / The joyless reading app being forced on my son |
It was only recently that I fully appreciated how the books I read as a child formed me. A pregnant friend asked me about my parenting philosophy and I realised it amounted to ensuring my son would survive a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I never had the money of Veruca Salt’s daddy to indulge his every desire, but I came down hard on chewing gum, gorging on chocolate and, above all, staring at a screen.
Despite my son’s complaints that I was acting like a father from Victorian times, it seemed to have worked, and, as the Oompa–Loompas predicted, not being glued to a screen encouraged him to become a reader, out of boredom if nothing else. If the house was quiet, too quiet, I would usually find him reading a book in a corner.
It was a surprise, then, that when he started at secondary school, a local academy, his biggest complaint was about the English homework – which was reading. He got a detention – his first – for not reading a storybook. I was on the verge of becoming Victorian Dad again when he showed me how he was supposed to read this book: all reading, to be counted by his English teacher, has to be done through an app on his tablet.
Sparx........