I teach children to read carefully, dangerously.

I became an English teacher because of one paragraph — a schoolteacher read us the last page of 'Charlotte's Web' and didn't hide that she was crying. I understood then that words on paper could do actual, physical things to a room. I've spent fifteen years engineering that moment for other people's children.

My classroom runs on argument and marginalia. Students keep commonplace books; annotations count for marks; the annual anthology of student writing is now in its tenth volume and has made three school libraries buy extra copies. Board results hold up — a 97% average at peak — but my real KPI is the ex-student who texts me from an airport because a line of Auden ambushed them.

If your school wants an English department where the library queue is longer than the canteen's — where children argue about semicolons with real feeling — I can start next term. I bring my own red pens.