Why Kids Hide Their Own Writing In School Workbooks: What I Found In My Old Secondary English Book
I was clearing out a stack of old boxes from my mom’s attic last month, looking for a spare graphing calculator to lend to my 14-year-old cousin starting high school, when my elbow knocked a cracked blue paperback off the top of the pile. It was my 10th grade secondary school English workbook, the cover crinkled from being stuffed in a locker between a half-eaten pack of gum and a rain-soaked gym uniform for a year. My name was scribbled in the corner, crossed out twice and rewritten smaller, like I was embarrassed to claim it.
I flipped through it out of boredom, pausing at the red pen marks from my old teacher: “Good answer, stick closer to the prompt next time” written in the margin of a sonnet analysis, “Irrelevant detail” scrawled next to a line where I’d mentioned that my grandma read that same poem at her wedding. All the answers were short, cramped, written just enough to get a B or C, no extra. I didn’t remember being that careful to stay on topic until I got to the back cover, where a folded sheet of loose-leaf paper was tucked into the gap between the cardboard and the last page, stained at the corner with what I’m pretty sure was old cherry Slurpee. I unfolded it, and it was a 7-page short story I’d written when I was 15, about a teen who runs away from her boarding school to tend a lighthouse on the coast of Maine. I’d completely forgotten I wrote it.
I remembered why I hid it, though. A month before I tucked that story back there, I’d added a three-sentence personal reflection to the end of an assigned essay. My teacher marked it all out with red pen and wrote “Stick to what’s asked—this won’t help your grade.” I got the message loud and clear: school work wasn’t for the things I actually cared about writing. It was for checking boxes. Any writing that was mine got hidden away where it wouldn’t cost me points.
I folded the story back up and stuffed it in my bag to take home, and when I walked in the door, my 13-year-old son was sitting at the kitchen table doing his own English homework. I leaned over his shoulder to see how it was going, and like always, his answers were just one or two lines, exactly what the question asked, no more. On a whim, I asked him, “What do you have hidden in the back of that notebook?” He froze for half a second, then flipped all the way to the end, past the lined homework pages, and pulled out a 12-page draft of a graphic novel script about his rescue dog who becomes a detective. He’d been writing it for two months and never said a word.
That’s the thing no one talks about much, right? We spend so much time worrying that kids don’t like writing, or don’t have any creativity, or don’t want to engage with school work. But half the time, they’ve already learned the rules: the stuff that counts for grades is the stuff that fits the prompt, and the stuff that’s actually theirs has to stay hidden. It’s not that they don’t have anything to say. It’s that they don’t want to get in trouble for saying the wrong thing.
I’ve tried a few small things since I found that old workbook, and they’ve worked way better than I expected. First, I don’t make a big deal out of the hidden stuff when I see it. I don’t demand he show me everything, or tell him he should turn it into a contest entry or post it online. If he lets me read a page, I just say, “That bit with the dog stealing the peanut butter is really funny. What happens next?” That’s it. No corrections, no unsolicited advice, no tying it back to his English grade. Second, when he’s doing homework and I see him scribbling his own stuff in the margins instead of the assigned work, I don’t immediately nag him to get back on task. I just say, “Can you show me that after you finish the first three questions?” That gives him something to look forward to, and it doesn’t make his writing feel like a distraction. It just feels like his.
I mentioned this story to my son’s English teacher at parent-teacher conferences last month, and she told me she started a tiny change last week: she adds one blank page at the end of every weekly homework packet, labeled “Extra Stuff” at the top, with a note that says no grade, no required comments, you can write whatever you want here. She said half the kids have filled it in already, even the quiet kids who never turn in extra credit. One kid drew a whole map of a made-up kingdom, another wrote a poem about his cat. It took her 10 extra seconds to add the page to her template, and it’s already changed how kids show up to her class.
I still have that old 7-page story tucked back into the back of my old workbook. I’ve read the first page twice, but I haven’t finished it. It feels weird to read my 15-year-old voice, all earnest and eager and convinced no one was ever going to see it. My son still keeps his graphic novel script hidden in the back of his notebook most of the time. He doesn’t want to share the whole thing with me yet, and that’s okay. We don’t need to dig up all the hidden parts and turn them into assignments or projects to make them count. Just letting kids know we know the hidden parts are there, that we’re not going to mark them irrelevant, is enough. Some things are allowed to stay in the back of the workbook for a while.
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