Having been handed the accolade of seeing his writing enshrined in a specimen GCSE exam paper, journalist Jay Rayner is now planning on “infuriating” the examining board by helping students with the answers.
The Observer’s food critic has tweeted that he will help parents, teachers and students to analyse a piece of his writing that has been used by AQA in its English language GCSE specimen papers.
The exam board bought, from the newspaper, an article in which Mr Rayner wrote about attempting to do his then 14-year-old’s maths homework.
It means that thousands of teenagers will be asked to unpick his writing, and, in a rebellious move, he has promised to help them scrutinise it.
‘I hated that sort of thing’
“Given I hated that sort of thing (I got a B at English language and a C at Eng lit), I thought I should help,” he tweeted.
The journalist intends to field questions using the hashtag #askJay on Thursday 17 November at 6pm.
“I may infuriate AQA and I do not guarantee anything I say will be helpful. But it could be fun. Year 10/11 people please RT.”
As I conclude this TES online article, I think it is unlikely that it will ever be used in a mock GCSE paper. But it could perhaps prove useful in an undergraduate postmodernism course as an example of a journalist writing about a journalist who wrote about his teen’s homework, which is now likely to form homework for many other teens.
An AQA spokesperson said: “It’s nice that Jay’s offering to help students like this. Hearing from the writer is a great contribution to the study of a text - if Shakespeare was alive and on Twitter, maybe he’d be offering to do the same.
“Jay doesn’t have to worry about infuriating us - the article is only from a specimen paper that anyone can see on our website, so it won’t come up in anyone’s summer exams.”
