One of my friends from school, Emma, is a teacher. She teaches history to teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18. She might do English sometimes too, I think, but it’s mostly history. The last time we met up she mentioned a phrase about teaching that stuck in my mind - “chalk and talk”. It’s a traditional approach to teaching apparently - write things on the board in chalk and then talk about them.

Emma doesn’t actually use chalk anymore. All the schools she has worked in have interactive white boards which can be used for writing but also display TV, slideshows, and internet items. We didn’t have those when I was in school. Kitty and Beth grew up in an era when children used small slates as their writing method to save on the cost of paper and ink, at least until they...

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