In year 7, I was asked to write a story for a class assignment. It was a pop-creative-writing task. I ended up writing a derivation of the Jonah and the Whale story from the bible. It was a Catholic school, the class before this one was Religion, so it was the first thing that came to mind. I went with it.
I was an A student. Top of the class in most things, I lived in the top 3 on my worst day with average scores of 90 out of 100. So when I got the mark back for my story, and I got a 55 out of 100, it had an impact.
Twenty years later, I still remember that mark. I remember the teacher, I remember the red ink, I remember the feeling, and I remember making a decision. I made a decision not to write. If I was good at so many other things, then maybe writing was just not ‘my thing’. I hid the story (and the mark) in shame and focussed on science, maths, sport, and computers.
What would have happened if, instead of a mark, I had a conversation? If the teacher approached it with empathy and curiosity and asked, “I can see where this story came from, can you?” If she asked, “The story is too similar to another, how do you think you could change it to make it different?” or “This is great for a first draft, here are a few tips for making it better.”
Instead, it took me 20 years of pursuing everything else *but* writing, before I found my way back. I blogged for a bit, wrote in my day-to-day at work, added captions to silly illustrations I was doing in my spare time. I found myself enjoying the process, so I sought out online resources. I began to study language in my spare time, found clippings of passages from other writers that I liked. I found a passion (and eventually a career) through persistence.
When I was in year 7, I was utterly unequipped to handle negative feedback delivered in a novice way. It’s fair to say that mark changed my life: one teacher, one mark, one comment.
Teachers have immense power in shaping children’s lives, and as with any job, some people are great at it, and some people aren’t. Giving feedback, coaching, and nurturing kids so that they learn from their failure, so that they persist and improve rather than run away, is hard. But it’s worth it.