Why We Spend More Time Making Worksheets Than Teaching from Them
The laminator was still warm at 10:45 on a Tuesday night. I was sitting on the floor of my kitchen, surrounded by half-cut strips of card stock, a pair of scissors with pink handles, and a granola bar crumb stuck to my ankle. I was making a matching game for my first grade class. The lesson was about beginning sounds. The game was cute — I had found the template online, printed it in color, and was now carefully cutting around the letters so they’d fit into the plastic pockets without curling.
My husband came in to refill his water glass. He looked at the floor for a long moment.
“Didn’t you stay up doing that last week?”
“Yes,” I said. “But last week it was numbers.”
“Right,” he said. “And the week before?”
“Handwriting practice.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. We both knew that the handwriting sheets had been used once and then sat in the “finish this if you have time” pile until they went home in a folder that most parents probably recycled without opening.
I want to be clear: I’m not someone who refurbishes classroom furniture or makes elaborate Pinterest displays. But worksheets — genuinely, lovingly made worksheets — are my particular trap. I will spend forty minutes adjusting the margins so the spacing feels “kind to small hands.” I will cut things into strips when the lesson plan said “hand out the sheet whole.” I have laminated things that did not require laminating. I once remade an entire worksheet because the border made the page feel cramped.
And the results?
The next morning, I handed out the beautiful matching game. Twelve minutes of the day went to instructions, sharing pieces, and helping three children find their names. Then the actual activity took about seven minutes. One child finished in three and declared it “so easy.” Another spent most of the time arranging the pieces into tidy rows along their desk, matching nothing. A third placed her piece in my lap and asked where babies come from.
The worksheet didn’t fail. It was fine. It did worksheet things. But I had spent 90 minutes of my evening on that fine. Ninety minutes for a seven-minute activity that was already in the curriculum kit — I just liked my version better.
There’s a subtle thing that happens when you make a worksheet. The making feels like teaching.
Sitting at the kitchen table with the colored pencils and the ruler and the template you’ve just perfected — it feels productive. It looks like teaching. If someone walked past, they’d see an educator doing educator things. And I think there’s a quiet, unspoken pressure in that. We are surrounded by images of beautifully prepared classrooms and carefully crafted activities. A plain photocopied page from the school’s reading program doesn’t look like effort. A handmade, illustrated, carefully cut-out matching game does.
But the teaching isn’t in the cutting. The teaching is in the moment when you crouch down next to a child who has picked up the letter M and is trying to figure out whether “moon” starts with M, and whether “Mommy” starts with the same sound, and whether the tiny sound they can hear in the middle — wait, that’s the N — no, there’s an “oo” too. The worksheet is just the stage. The real play happens around it.
I remember an afternoon when the photocopier ate my stack of pages and I had no worksheets for the last lesson of the day. Panic. I gave each child a blank piece of paper, drew one big letter at the top of the whiteboard, and simply asked them to listen to the sounds of the room — the heater hum, the creak of the door, my voice. They wrote or drew the sounds they could hear. It was one of the messiest lessons of the term, and one of the most alive.
The same is true at home. We have a pile of printable activity packs in our kitchen drawer. You probably have one too — the “summer workbook,” the “handwriting without tears” packet, the laminated placemats with the alphabet along the edge. Most get used twice and then return to the drawer, somehow heavier each time. Then on a rainy afternoon, your child picks up a pen and draws a “story” on the back of an old envelope and tells it to you for the next forty-five minutes.
The worksheet was never the point. The thinking was.
So here’s what I’ve started to do differently, as much as I actually manage.
I no longer make a resource unless it can be made in under twenty minutes. That’s the whole rule. If I can’t finish it during one cup of coffee, it’s too complicated for what it’s adding. And if I catch myself adjusting the border for the third time, I stop. The children will not notice the border.
I’ve also started asking, before I print anything: “What is this replacing?” If the answer is “a conversation,” I don’t make it. If the answer is “the whiteboard,” I don’t make it. If the answer is “a blank piece of paper with a question at the top,” I definitely don’t make it. Blank paper gets an unfair reputation in teaching. Kids are brilliant in blank spaces — they fill them with their own stuff, which is always better than mine.
And at home, when a printable isn’t landing, I let it go. I know parents who feel guilty about the $17 activity folder their child never touched. There’s a kind of judgment waiting in the kitchen drawer. But a worksheet is just a suggestion of an idea. If it doesn’t take, the kids are telling you something better is happening.
I’m not anti-worksheet, to be clear. Some children thrive on the structure of a finished page. Some skills genuinely need repetition, and a well-designed page can provide it. I use them — I’ll always use them. But I’ve stopped feeling moral about them.
The laminator sat unused for three weeks after that night. Then I noticed the laminate sheets had gone a little bent in the package, and I got annoyed about the waste, and I made a set of phonics strips — again at night, again to zero fanfare. Old habits.
But I do it differently now. I set a timer. I use ugly margins. And at 10:45, I ask myself a question that got me through the rest of the year: “Whose job is this, exactly — to make it look like teaching, or to actually teach?”
The answer is so obvious I could put it on a worksheet.
I’d just spend forty minutes cutting it out.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why We Spend More Time Making Worksheets Than Teaching from Them