Why Your Kid Thinks Their English Teacher Is Mean (And What’s Usually Going On)
The water for pasta was boiling over when Lila slammed her backpack onto the kitchen counter last October. She’s my 10th grader, and she’d just come from English, her least favorite period that semester. “Ms. Henderson is so rude, for no reason,” she said, yanking a crumpled essay out of her bag and tossing it across the counter. Red ink bled through the margins, a big C- scrawled at the top, and one entire paragraph—the one she’d stayed up an extra hour writing after dinner—was crossed out with a thick red line. It’s the paragraph about my mom’s garden, the one Lila wrote because she said it reminded her of Atticus Finch’s weird quiet morality in To Kill a Mockingbird, the unit they were on. “She just hates good writing,” Lila said, crossing her arms. “Why are English teachers always like this?”
I used to teach 8th grade English before I stopped working to be home with the kids, so I’ve heard this question from kids and parents a hundred times. Everyone wants to know why English teachers seem so much meaner than math teachers or science teachers, why they’re so rude for no reason. I decided I’d email Ms. Henderson, not to yell, just to ask what was going on, because I knew from experience that what looks like meanness usually isn’t.
We met for coffee after school at the little shop by the high school. She had a 2-year-old at home, had graded 40 essays the night before after putting the baby down, and had coffee stains on her crumpled lesson plan. She pulled out Lila’s essay, pointed to that crossed out paragraph, and said, “That’s such good writing. I told her that in the margin, right here, look.” I leaned in, and there was a tiny note tucked in the corner under the cross out that said “This is lovely imagery – keep this for your personal writing, just tie it to the prompt here.” Lila never saw it. She just saw the big red cross out and the low grade, and took it personally.
Ms. Henderson said the thing about teaching English is that you can’t just grade right or wrong answers. If I mark up their writing, I’m not just correcting a comma splice, I’m asking them to rework how they’re explaining what they think. Kids take that as me attacking them, not attacking the assignment. That makes sense. I remember when I taught, I once had a kid write an essay about losing his dog, got completely off topic from the prompt about personal growth, and when I marked it down, he told his mom I hated him. I wasn’t thinking anything about him as a person, I was just grading the assignment we’d worked on for two weeks. Most of the time, what feels like a personal attack is just a teacher doing the job they’re paid to do.
I’ve found that when parents jump in right away, either taking the kid’s side or telling the kid they must have messed up, it just makes things worse. What I do now, when Lila or any of my friend’s kids says their English teacher is mean, I ask three specific questions that anyone can use. First: “Show me what they wrote or said exactly, don’t just tell me they were mean.” Second: “What did the assignment ask you to do, anyway?” Third: “Is there any part of what they said that makes sense, even if it feels mean right now?”
When I asked Lila those questions after I met Ms. Henderson, she sat down and re-read the whole essay, and admitted she’d added the garden paragraph the night before it was due, and forgot to add any line connecting it back to Atticus, like the prompt asked. She just assumed Ms. Henderson hated it and hated her. It didn’t erase the frustration she felt, but it took the “for no reason” part right out of it.
If you do need to reach out to the teacher, I’ve found a specific line works way better than accusing them of being rude. Just start your email with: “My kid is really frustrated with their last assignment, and I want to help them understand what you’re looking for. Could you walk me through the feedback you gave?” When I emailed Ms. Henderson, that’s exactly what I said, and she was happy to meet me. Most teachers hate conflict as much as you do. They’re just swamped—they don’t have time to write 10 lines of soft sugar coating on every essay when they have 120 essays to grade in a weekend. What feels like rude bluntness is often just exhaustion and a packed schedule.
The biggest disconnect, I think, is that for kids, writing is personal. When you write something that matters to you—like a paragraph about your grandma’s garden or a poem about how much you miss your old dog—that piece of writing feels like a piece of you. So when a teacher marks it up, it feels like they’re rejecting you, not just the essay. For the teacher, though, it’s just work. They’re supposed to teach you how to write better, how to communicate your ideas clearer, and that means correcting things that are off topic or unclear. Most of the time, they’re not even thinking about you as a person, they’re just thinking about the essay sitting in front of them.
That doesn’t mean English teachers are never mean. I’ve had bad teachers, too, teachers who were just burnt out and took it out on kids. But it’s almost never for no reason. Most of the time, it’s just that no one’s talking about the gap between what the kid feels and what the teacher is actually trying to do.
Lila ended up revising the essay for half credit back, added the line connecting the garden to Atticus’s love of growing things and quiet integrity, got a B+ in the end. She still thinks Ms. Henderson is too strict, and she still complains about having to write essays. Last week she came home saying Ms. Henderson made fun of her poem in front of the class. I asked her the three questions, and it turned out Ms. Henderson just asked her to explain what her metaphor meant, and Lila thought that was public teasing when Ms. Henderson just wanted her to share her idea with the class. It’s not always fixed overnight, and it’s still messy sometimes. But it’s almost never meanness for no reason. It’s just English.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Your Kid Thinks Their English Teacher Is Mean (And What’s Usually Going On)