Why Is My Child Saying Their English Teacher Is Mean For No Reason? A Teacher’s Perspective
The gravel by the middle school bike rack was still damp from morning rain last October when my 13-year-old Lila came storming toward me, neon pink helmet askew, backpack thudding against her hips. She kicked a loose chip of stone that bounced off a parked minivan, then stopped and crossed her arms. “Ms. Henderson is so rude. She’s mean for no reason at all.”
She pulled her crumpled poetry assignment out of her bag. The prompt had asked for a personal poem about someone you love, and Lila had written it about her grandma, who’d died the year before. The page was covered in red pen marks: comma splice fixed here, vague imagery noted there, a big C- scrawled at the top, and a one-line comment: Needs tighter narrative structure to meet assignment requirements. Lila told me she’d poured three hours into it after school, and Ms. Henderson didn’t even care that it was about Grandma. She just tore it apart for fun.
I heard the exact same complaint three days later at the parent coffee at the bakery down the street. Another mom, stirring a lukewarm blueberry muffin, said her 8th grader had gotten a detention from Ms. Henderson the week before for forgetting his copy of The Giver. He’d left it in his locker after PE, she said, and Ms. Henderson yelled at him in front of the whole class instead of letting him borrow an extra. Why do English teachers get so worked up over nothing, she asked. Why are they so mean for no reason?
As a former middle and high school English teacher who now teaches first-year writing at the local community college, I’ve been on both sides of this question. I remember my first semester student teaching, when I was 22, living in a studio apartment with a broken mini-fridge, staying up until 1 a.m. grading 125 essays a week on cheap instant coffee. I had a 10th grader named Mia turn in a personal narrative about her parents’ divorce, messy and raw and full of uncorrected comma splices. I marked every error, wrote a paragraph of notes on how to tighten her structure, and turned it back. She came to class after the bell crying, told me I hated her story and I didn’t care that it was true. That’s when I started to understand why English teachers get this reputation more than any other teacher.
Math has right answers. Science has lab procedures that are either followed or not. Even history has specific dates and facts that are easy to mark right or wrong. English is different. Almost everything we grade is a piece of the kid sitting in front of us. We grade poems about their dead grandparents, essays about their political beliefs, personal narratives about their first heartbreak. When we mark up that work, it doesn’t feel like we’re marking a wrong answer. It feels like we’re marking them. That core difference is the root of almost all the “meanness” people see.
Add to that the sheer volume of work English teachers carry. A full-time middle school English teacher usually has 120 to 150 students a semester. That means 120 to 150 essays or writing assignments to grade every two weeks. No one has time to write a three-line positive preface to every comment before getting to the critical feedback. We get blunt, because we have to get through the stack before the next assignment is due. That bluntness reads as rudeness, even when we don’t mean it that way.
Ms. Henderson explained all this to us when we met for parent-teacher conferences a week after Lila’s poem came home. She pulled out Lila’s poem, tapped the rubric she’d handed out two weeks before the assignment, and pointed to the line that required at least three specific sensory details to support the core topic. Lila had written a lovely, broad poem about loving Grandma, but she’d skipped that requirement entirely—Ms. Henderson had gone over it three times in class, but Lila had been so excited to write that she’d skipped reading the rubric. She had 142 students, Ms. Henderson said, she’d graded 142 poems in six days, and she’d forgotten to add a positive comment at the top. She really did love the line Lila wrote about Grandma’s lavender sugar cookies.
What I’ve learned from this, both as a parent and a teacher, is that the first thing to do when your kid says their English teacher is mean for no reason isn’t to fire off an angry email. It’s to ask three specific questions, one after another: What exactly did the teacher say or do, word for word? What was happening right before that, like had the class already been warned about that rule multiple times that week? What do you think the teacher was actually reacting to, other than just being rude? For Lila, answering those questions made her realize she’d missed the requirement on the rubric, not that Ms. Henderson hated her grandma.
For teachers, the small fix that makes a huge difference is the 10-second positive comment at the top of every graded paper, before any critical feedback. It doesn’t have to be long. It can just be “This line about your grandma’s cookies is so vivid and beautiful” or “I love the argument you make here about Atticus being a bad dad.” It takes 10 extra seconds per paper, and it changes how a kid reads the rest of the feedback. They’ll see you actually read their work, not just marked it up.
Last week Lila came home talking about how Ms. Henderson let them pick any topic for their next poetry unit, and she’s already drafting another one about Grandma. She still rolls her eyes when Ms. Henderson reminds everyone to bring their books to class, but she doesn’t call her mean anymore. Ms. Henderson still forgets to add that opening positive comment more often than she’d like, with 142 papers to grade every other week. Most of the time, the “meanness” isn’t actually meanness. It’s just a kid pouring their heart into a piece of writing, a teacher rushing to get through a stack of grading, two people talking past each other because no one has the time or energy to soften every edge. It’s not fair to anyone, but it’s normal. And usually, a 10-minute conversation after school is enough to untangle most of it.
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