Supporting Our Creative Students

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I have always been a creative writer. When I look back, I can remember bringing home a Hallowe’en story from my grade two class, folded over but ready to be added to a stack of short stories. I can remember trying to write my first novel at age nine. The main character was likewise a nine year old—a pet detective who was on a case—but the story floundered somewhere around page forty-nine. I was shy and under confident and terribly secretive about my creativity. I shared my work on occasions with people but found their spelling corrections and criticism hard to handle. I never understood why they didn’t enjoy the story.

For whatever reason, I hit it off with my grade six teacher big time. I told her in an after school conversation that “I was a writer, that I wrote poems and stories.” She told me that she would read anything I wrote. She seemed to understand that I didn’t want publicity, so when I first handed her a poem, I did it quietly after school. The next day, she told me that she thought that I had done a great job on it. She asked me questions. She read pretty much everything I wrote that year and my writing flourished while in her class. I had my first reader of my private work. I had more confidence in my abilities and some of my private work started to find its way into class assignments.

The following year, I tried to hand in my best work for creative writing assignments, but they were all marked out of ten and of course, I never received one “ten” that entire year. I even wrote what the teacher seemed to want in order to get a ten and eventually just gave up. Let’s just say my writing took a turn for the worse.

I mention all this history because, after comparing notes with people, I have discovered that my experience represents many.

Obviously, we as teachers do have to have assessment and purpose within our school system. It is the rule these days that each assignment has to have an objective and an evaluation tool. But we cannot promote our artists, our writers, our future scientists and any number of creative people by marking everything out of ten. We must introduce sometimes for the sake of introducing. We must allow some things to go unmarked and uncorrected with a positive comment or two. As teachers, we must use words everybody likes to hear, “that is neat,” “wow” to encourage, validate and inspire all students. Each of us has something creative to express. We must strive to recognize this creativity in a positive and inspiring way.

Robyn Whyte is the author of Lessons from the Ledge, a set of lesson plans for teaching creative writing, (see page 13). She is a classroom teacher currently working in Ontario.