Great. The electronic whiteboard in particular seems to work, not least because of the sophisticated and responsive piece of apparatus which stands beside it and answers to the name of Teacher. It was always obvious that computer technology would only get really helpful when control of the machinery was prised from the hands of people with an unhealthy technical interest in random access memory.

But it focuses the mind on other, older visual aids to making stuff sink into children’s minds. Take the most basic technology of all, colouring in. I was well and truly told off by post the other day for including in a novel (Passing Go) a brief scene in which the 11-year-old son of the house is gloomily confronting his homework “which was nearly all colouring in and copying and drawing. Kids’ work. Resignedly pulling the folder towards him and starting to shade in a patch of steppe...” etc. My correspondent, an eminent geographer, said that geography is much more whizzily taught these days, and no longer imposes “strategies of the kind you suggest”.

I wholly sympathise. It must be very annoying to modern teachers that novelists are adults, who therefore tend to portray homework as anything from 10 to 50 years out of date. I take his point that geography has moved on since 1965. But that bit of homework was actually given to my own 11-year-old in the mid-90s and looked very tedious and frustrating for a bright but cack-handed child well past primary school.

The teacher at the time said that physical, copyist work was “the only way” to get the general outlines of the world into children’s minds. Similarly an RE teacher who kept sending the other one home with “word squares”, as featured in puzzle magazines, out of which the pupil was required to find such significant biblical words as “Jacob” “ladder” and “angel”. When asked why the same word square had been set two weeks running, this man of God replied “Ah, I think you’ll find we’re concentrating on Jacob for most of this academic year”. True...

I have no real complaints, just a parental puzzlement which I find is quite widely shared by the naturally inartistic. Why are intellectual 16-year-olds still required to cut out pictures of roulades and tarts from magazines to illustrate their food-tech folder? Why do you lose marks in a cerebral subject like economics if your pie chart isn’t perfectly circular and neatly coloured in? Why does a friend’s fairly brilliant child, at a top-rated comprehensive, spend so much time tracing? In the age of the electronic singing whiteboard, will there still be such an emphasis on ruled straight lines in red and green Biro?

I am trying to think back, fairly, to my own education and how much all this visual drudgery helped . At primary school it definitely did: I can still see the shape of Italy because it was so damn tricky getting the heel of the boot right. Over 11, though, I am less sure. I remember that our RE teacher in the lower fifth was very keen indeed on making us do diagrams of spiritual matters - I can still draw a mean chalice and a passable Holy Ghost - but beyond that, none of the things I remember have much to do with the things I drew, untidily and smudgily, in exercise books. Despite endless incompetent biology diagrams, what I actually recall are things I was vividly told, or saw demonstrated on a defunct dogfish and a couple of hard-boiled eggs.

I never minded drawing experiments we had actually done, but maps of the human digestive system or circulation never stayed in my mind as biological facts, simply because the chief association is the sense of panic at having lost the red crayon and having to do the blood in orange.

I fear virtuality and the screen as much as any old codger: nobody thinks that prodding buttons on a computer and staring at pixels takes you to genuine understanding. And I have always had rather a yen for that style of maths teaching in which you all go outside and the teacher throws a ball at you and everyone shouts numbers. But of all the physical aids to secondary learning, the one I most mistrust is colouring-in. I wish someone would convince me that it works; because there’s a lot of it about.