Mrs. Spankey’s Maternal Gaze

She spoke slowly and reassuringly, as though to a group of nervous infants. There was no language in the world, she said, which was not arduous to learn to read and write. If learning could be fun, that was all very well. But fun was peripheral. Teachers and parents should embrace the fact that at the heart of language learning was difficulty. Triumph over difficulty was what gave children their dignity and a sense of mental discipline. The English language, she said, was a minefield of irregularity, of exceptions outnumbering rules. But it had to be crossed, and crossing it was work. Teachers were too afraid of unpopularity, too fond of sugaring pills. They should accept difficulty, celebrate it, and make their pupils do likewise. There was only one way to learn to spell and that was through exposure, immersion, in the written word. How else–and she rattled off a well-rehearsed list–do we learn the spellings of through, tough, bough, cough, and though? Mrs. Spankey’s maternal gaze raked the attentive faces. Diligence, she said, application, discipline, and jolly hard work.

— Ian McEwan, The Child in Time (1987)