Kids, writing should never be a punishment

Tim Engstrom, Pothole Prairie

Published Tuesday, April 7, 2009

“I want you to write a 1,000-word essay, longhand, single-spaced, double-sided on life inside a pingpong ball. Due tomorrow.”

That was a favorite punishment of a science teacher I had in junior high school and senior high school.

He would dole out wacky writing punishments and rarely to the class disrupters. He would catch me or others laughing at a joke or a prank a classmate pulled. We would get the punishment; the joker would get off scot-free, even though there was never any doubt the teacher knew who the true joker was.

And if you were late turning in the assignment, he would double it.

Have teachers ever given you writing as a punishment?

Maybe they made you write the same sentence over and over on a chalkboard. Maybe they made you write from the dictionary. Maybe they had even made you read or do math as a punishment.

Writing should never be a punishment.

First, teachers want to encourage a love for writing, which is integral to being successful as an adult. The disciplinary measure gives writing a negative association.

Second, writing is a major component of academia. Why turn the backbone of schoolwork into drudgery? This, too, teaches the wrong lesson.

The same logic fits for reading, math or other basics of education as punishments.

The blog “Paper Notes in a Digital World” by Mike Swickey rants about writing as a punishment. He writes about the punitive effect, “The message is clear. If you, Johnny or Sally, do something wrong you may very well be forced to write — and we know how much you hate to write! Or if you don’t hate to write, you should!”

Checking online, apparently writing still serves as a punishment in some schools, though it isn’t as widespread as it once was and it was never as widespread as the entertainment field makes it out to be. (Think Bart Simpson at the introduction to “The Simpsons.”)

I checked with a classroom of ninth-graders at Albert Lea High School, and it seems writing isn’t much of a punishment in Albert Lea’s schools. Only one student said he had to write from the dictionary back in middle school.

In my high school, that bad science teacher was the only teacher who did such brainless assignments. Other teachers could keep the students behaving by engaging them in a novel concept called “education.”

See, amazingly enough, by actually teaching us stuff, we would be focused on learning and less likely to fool around. The good teachers — to be sure, my little school had mostly good teachers — rarely had to discipline people. But the science teacher was more of a farmer/comedian, so he mainly inspired his classes toward trouble. Somedays, he would let us be crazy and silly, then the next he expected strict attention. Sometimes, the period would go from one extreme to the other.

A look at his ceiling revealed the room’s atmosphere: pencils and spitballs.

You might ask, “Geez, teachers can’t strike kids. All the punishments seem to get thrown out. How are teachers supposed to keep kids in line if they can’t punish them?”

Keep the students on task and, especially, implement positive reinforcement. Reseach has shown over and over that the best way to manage a classroom is positive reinforcement. If you have a joker, stop the class and kindly explain to the problem student that the behavior is disrupting learning for the rest of the class. Explain the consequences of the action — which often gets overlooked in most disciplinary actions.

Now, of course, there is trouble beyond the level I am writing about here: Bullying, assault, drugs. Those are other matters.

But if you — directly as a student or indirectly as a parent — encounter writing as a punishment, I’d advise you to talk to the school’s principal. In fact, the National Council of Teachers of English condemned writing as a punishment in 1984.

If only I knew then what I know now, I could have used that tidbit of information before I graduated in 1989 to stop Mr. Farmer/Comedian/Science Teacher from punishing later classes with writing.

So if writing as a punishment has a negative association, then you might be wondering how I became a journalist. Have I ever mentioned what great English teachers I had?

Tribune Managing Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every Tuesday.

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