What I Found In My Old Secondary School English Workbook Changed How I Talk To Kids About Mistakes
The cardboard box gave way when I dragged it off the top shelf of my mom’s attic last month, and a stack of mold-free 16-year-old exercise books tumbled onto the dusty pine floorboards. One navy blue, cover scuffed with a half-erased doodle of a tabby cat, landed at my feet. It was my old secondary school English workbook. I flipped it open while I waited for my sister to bring a dustpan, and that’s when I stopped.
I was the quiet 13-year-old who never put her hand up, never turned in work that felt less than perfect, and left half the page blank if I wasn’t sure I was right. Flipping through that book, I could feel that old anxiety again – the tight chest when I didn’t know the answer, the urge to scribble out everything I’d written if it felt wrong. What I didn’t expect was to see how my teacher, Ms. Henderson, responded to that anxiety. It wasn’t anything I’d remembered until I saw it in red pen.
On page 17, we’d been assigned to write a free verse poem about our favorite place. I wrote two lines: “The oak tree at the end of the lane / smells like rain and gum,” then scribbled out the rest of the page and wrote in the margin, “I don’t know what to say next.” Ms. Henderson didn’t write “try harder” or “this needs more work” or dock me half a mark for not filling the page. She wrote back, right under my note: “That’s fine. You can stop here. Two good lines are better than ten bad ones. Bring this back after class if you want to add more another day.”
I flipped another dozen pages. On a book review of The Giver, I’d written that I thought the story was boring and I didn’t care what happened to Jonas. Ms. Henderson wrote: “Fair point. I don’t love teaching this one most years. Thanks for being honest.” When I left the last question of a comprehension exercise blank because I couldn’t decide between two answers, she wrote “No worries, let’s talk about it next lesson” instead of marking it wrong and taking off a point.
I sat on that attic floor for 20 minutes turning the pages, and I realized something: I’m a part-time English tutor now, and I have a 12-year-old daughter in secondary school, and I’ve been doing the opposite of this almost this whole time. I see it every week: tutees who leave whole sections of writing blank because they’re scared of getting the interpretation wrong. My daughter comes home from school with half her homework crossed out because she decided her answers weren’t good enough to turn in. I’d always told them “it doesn’t have to be perfect” but that was vague. I still pushed them to fill every space, to guess if they were stuck, to stretch a two-paragraph idea into five paragraphs just to hit the word count.
The workbook made me rethink all those small, daily choices. It’s not that kids should never finish assignments or never try to correct mistakes. It’s that we’ve created this unspoken rule that any blank space, any “I don’t know,” any half-finished idea is a failure. That’s what creates the anxiety that makes kids refuse to write anything at all.
The changes I’ve made are small, no big curriculum overhauls or fancy family meetings. First, when my daughter or a tutee leaves a question blank because they’re stuck, I don’t make them force an answer. We just write a short note in the margin: “Stuck here, can we go over this in class” that the teacher can see. No points lost, no guilt. Second, when a kid writes an opinion I don’t agree with, or that’s not the “correct” take on a story, I don’t correct it first. I just write a question back, like “What makes you think that?” like Ms. Henderson did. Last month a tutee wrote an essay arguing that Romeo and Juliet were just two impulsive kids who got what they deserved, and I wrote “Fair point, well argued” instead of pushing her to write the “true love and tragic fate” take the exam board expects. She got a B on that essay, and she told me it was the first assignment she didn’t stay up until midnight stressing over. Third, I stopped forcing kids to hit word counts if they’ve said everything they want to say. If my daughter can say what she needs to in two paragraphs instead of five, that’s okay. She can turn it in as is.
After the attic clean out, I brought the workbook home and put it on the shelf next to my daughter’s school books. Last week she was working on a creative writing assignment, crumpled up two drafts, and said she couldn’t do it, everything she wrote was stupid. I pulled out the workbook and showed her my two-line poem and Ms. Henderson’s comment. She read it, shrugged, and said “Can I just write two paragraphs about my hamster escaping? That’s all I want to write.” I said yes. She turned it in, got a great comment from her teacher, and taped it to the fridge.
I still mess up sometimes. When there’s a big deadline, I still catch myself telling her to just add another line, just try to fill the space. But I glance at that blue scuffed cover on the shelf, and I remember. It’s still working. Some things don’t need to be fixed, or finished, or perfect to be good enough.
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