We need to stop putting literature on a pedestal. We need to stop reading books with white cotton gloves. We need to start treating literature like a living, responsive, imperfect thing. 

I study English and French at the University of Oxford – I was born with verbal dyspraxia and a phonological disorder, so I didn’t speak properly until quite late. One does not cancel out the other. Any student can learn to love to read and write. Teaching has taught me that what students need is creative freedom, and the permission to make mistakes.

Literature is not created in a vacuum. Writers stub their toes too! They write through bad days and summer holidays, through revolutions and dog days. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, had bad days – many of them, in fact. It is important to remember to allow students to dislike books, to let them criticise the writer’s faults. It is much better to let students move onto a different book if their current one is boring, rather than forcing them to finish it. Reading should never be about endurance.

So, we need to stop privileging certain types of reading as ‘educational’, or certain types of books as ‘good literature’. Reading reality tv’s subtitles, a menu, the packaging label of an ice lolly, the captions on a comic strip – that is all reading. We learn through active recall and repetition, of course. However, we also, crucially, learn through absorption.

Failure is not a full stop; it is an opportunity for learning. We need to stop encouraging students to erase any trace of their mistakes for the sake of neatness. So many students wield tip-Ex or an eraser as if it protects them from failure. Yet we should not seek to eliminate errors, but instead keep them. To remember where we went wrong, to get better.

Life itself is messy. Its story cannot be told in a perfect calligraphic script. Mistakes happen. What matters is how we learn from them.