A teacher’s confession and apology to students everywhere
In teaching writing, we teachers have taught our students all wrong.
We have taught them that grammatical rules are more important than speaking honestly and sincerely from their heart.
We have drilled them in empty meaningless exercises.
We have said: “We don’t care what you really think or feel as long as the subject of your sentence agrees with its verb.”
We have valued the appearance of writing over its reality.
No wonder students hate writing.
Many of my students have written beautiful, deeply felt and very real sentences – ungrammatically. They flow from my students’ spontaneous freewriting in response to a prompt.
Meaning shines through the imperfect English. In some cases, the ungrammatical English is beautiful.
It is my experience that our emphasis on “correct” English does more damage than good.
It stifles the students’ natural creative spark.
It teaches them fear and insecurity and self-doubt.
It robs them of their natural love of writing and their joy in the creative process of expression.
When students unlearn what we have taught them, their writing improves dramatically – and when they speak from their heart, so does their grammar.
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