Notes and links from 21 Aug

The hellbound horror of GCSEs This starts as the usual “don’t worry about your GCSEs kids, no-one will ever care about them” piece with an amusingly cringe photo of the author aged 16, but then Ian Dale gets into this really interesting idea that studying for them is a transformative moment between childhood wonder and the drudgery of work. I am therefore grateful to GCSEs. Not because they taught me anything - I learned absolutely nothing - but because they instructed me on how to work. And in particular they taught me how to work for sustained periods of intense activity. My mum, who was herself a teacher and therefore quite invested in my education, was clear that I was doing fine at school until I had to write essays. We could put this down to all manner of things that were not diagnosed in the 1980s - dyspraxia, AuDHD, you name it - or we can go with the contemporary observation that I just wasn’t “achieving my potential” for some reason (subtext, laziness), but the end result…