English Teacher Pet Peeve #1 — Writing as Punishment

You know, teaching English is hard. We have to teach kids how to hone the craft of writing and how to sharpen the skills of reading.

If they aren’t honed or sharpened, the rest of their classes and skills fall behind.

It’s a big responsibility.

Within this responsibility, we have some universal feelings about the teaching of reading and writing — the teaching of reading and writing in students and through teachers.

Here’s one of the hard-to-avoid ones now: Assigning writing as punishment.

Even as an English teacher, I have fallen into this trap. It’s hard not to. It’s the middle of a class period, you had an awesome lesson planned, and the kids are taking group work to a level they shouldn’t be taking it. You know how it is.

What is an easy fallback when students need to be quiet? Writing.

Here’s the issue we (yes, I feel like I can speak for them) have with that.

We do lots and lots of work to get students to love — or even mildly enjoy— writing. When writing is associated with punishment, kids automatically learn to hold disdain for it, and then they hold a disdain for all that English teachers do.

And that makes our job harder.

It hurts the kids, too.

It hurts them two-fold even. In your class — when you actually want them to write things — and in our classes when we do basically anything.

Imagine this in an English class: “You aren’t doing what you need to do right now, go sit quietly in your desk and do this science experiment instead.”

Or.

“Group work isn’t working for us right now, let’s go sit at our desks and quietly do algebra.”

That doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, sure, the nature of the assignments is different, but you get the point of my masterful analogy.

In some ways, it is the curse of the English teacher. We have the one content and skill focus that can be applied with activities in different content areas.

It’s easy for a science teacher to assign writing; it’s hard for an English teacher to assign science work.

It’s responsibility we LOVE having — truly.

Yet, it’s also a responsibility we are held accountable for even when others teach it, too.

If I taught your math students math, and you were held accountable for it…

Well, it might not turn out well, you know?

Just think about us the next time you’re writing in class.

Make sure the writing is purposeful.

And make sure the writing isn’t a punishment.

Do it for the kids. (And for us English teachers.)

(Public Service Announcement: this also applies to reading.)

Happy Writing.