What happens when a struggling student hits their big goal: a teacher’s perspective
The bell for dismissal is supposed to ring in two minutes, and I’m wiping crumbs of a peanut butter granola bar off my desk when Mia knocks on my door. She’s an 8th grader who comes to my after-school reading intervention for dyslexia, and her backpack is slipping off one shoulder, her hoodie still smells like the hallway’s burnt microwave popcorn. She’s biting her lower lip so hard it’s almost white, and she shoves her phone right in my face before I can say hello.
The screen glows with an email subject line: Congratulations on your acceptance to the Young Writers Workshop.
I remember two years ago, when Mia first sat down in my class. She slid her notebook all the way off her desk onto the floor when I walked by, and when I asked her what she liked to write about, she shrugged and said “Nothing. I’m bad at words. Everyone knows that.” She’d turn in assignments that were three sentences long, max, and if I pressed her to add more, she’d tell me she was too tired, that it hurt her head to sound out the words long enough to get them down.
A year ago, her mom pulled me aside after a parent teacher conference and asked if I thought Mia was wasting her time even applying for this workshop. The application needed a 500-word personal essay and a 1000-word writing sample, and most of the kids who get in are already turning out polished work that reads like it’s written by adults. Mia could barely get through a 500-word chapter book without taking breaks. But when I asked Mia what she thought, she twisted the strap of her backpack and said “I want to do it anyway. I have stories I want to tell.”
That’s when we made our plan. We meet for 15 minutes every Wednesday after school, and every week Mia sets her own goal. The first week, it was just write down three story ideas, no more. The second week, write one paragraph about her favorite idea. She wanted to write about rescuing stray cats around her neighborhood, so that’s what we started with. When she said she could only write 100 words a week, that was fine with me. I didn’t push her to go faster to hit some arbitrary application deadline I had in my head. It took her five weeks to write the 500-word personal essay, when most applicants do it in a weekend. That didn’t matter.
Another thing we did: we didn’t touch spelling or grammar until she was done with the whole draft and happy with what it said. A lot of times, parents and teachers jump in to correct every misspelled word the second a kid puts pen to paper, and that makes them stop caring about what they’re writing. They just worry about getting every word right. So we worked on five spelling errors a session after she finished her draft, instead of overwhelming her with 30 mistakes all at once. That’s something any parent or teacher can do, it doesn’t take extra training or extra time, just a little patience.
When she hit send on the application back in February, she cried a little in my classroom. She said she couldn’t believe she actually finished it, no matter what happened. I told her that finishing was the win already, but I didn’t think she’d believe me until she got this email.
After she left to catch her bus, I sat back down at my desk and thought about all the conversations I have every month with parents who are panicking because their kid is a grade behind in reading, or takes twice as long to finish homework, or can’t do the same extracurriculars their friends are doing. A lot of the time, the question I get is “what do we do to speed them up?” But the thing this experience reminds me is that speeding up doesn’t help anyone. It just makes the kid quit before they get to the good part.
Concretely, if you’re a parent or teacher sitting with a kid who has a big goal that feels out of reach, there are three small things you can do that work way better than pushing them harder. First, let them set the size of their weekly steps. If they can only do 15 minutes of work a week on their goal, that’s enough. Small steps add up faster than you think, even when they take longer. Second, separate the thing they care about from the skills they’re still building. If your kid loves drawing but can’t stay inside the lines yet, let them draw whatever they want before you talk about technique. If they love writing but struggle with spelling, let them finish their story before you correct mistakes. Third, celebrate the small finish lines, not just the big end goal. Mia celebrated when she finished the first paragraph, when she finished the first draft, when she hit send. That built the confidence to keep going when it felt hard.
This acceptance isn’t a magic fix. Mia still struggles with spelling tests. She still has days where her dyslexia makes reading so tiring she doesn’t want to do any work at all. She still crumples up her paper when she’s frustrated. We don’t know if she’ll love the workshop, or if she’ll end up being a writer when she grows up, or if this will just be a fun two weeks where she meets other kids who like talking about cats and stories as much as she does.
That’s okay. The greatest news a student can get isn’t just an acceptance letter to a program they wanted. It’s the proof that they can show up for something they care about, even when it takes longer than it takes everyone else. Right now, Mia’s working on a little zine about her neighborhood stray cats, and she asked me to help her print copies to hand out at the local library. We’re starting next week, 15 minutes on Wednesday, just like always.
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