High School English Feels Like a Game of Pleasing Your Teacher Rather Than Expressing True Creativity and Unique Ideas

Just Because You Didn’t Fit the System Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Write.

I’ll admit it: I played the game too. I had to. If I wanted the marks I needed to get into medical school, there was no other choice. True creativity, real original thought — those were luxuries I couldn't afford if I wanted to survive the system. And so, like thousands of others, I learned early that success in high school English wasn’t about expressing genuine ideas. It was about decoding the teacher’s expectations and giving them exactly what they wanted.

After correcting over 5,000 student essays myself, I have come to hate the grim reality: high school English has stopped being about thinking, feeling, or even writing. It’s a bureaucratic exercise — a tightrope walk across pre-determined criteria that rewards compliance over creativity, obedience over originality.

The students who write the most interesting ideas — the ones who dare to experiment, to question, to take a risk — are often the ones penalised the harshest. Their essays don’t "tick enough boxes." Their writing doesn’t "address the rubric requirements." Their creative pieces don’t follow the neat, predictable arcs demanded by assignment sheets designed more for moderating marks than nurturing minds.

It’s not a secret either. Students know the game. They know that if they formulaically spit out a bullshit TEEL paragraph or an excessive five-paragraph piece with a pithy conclusion, they’re rewarded. They know that if they pick a “safe” interpretation of a text — one that’s been said a hundred times before — they’ll get the marks. They know that creativity is a branding exercise, not a genuine invitation.

Ask any honest Year 11 or 12 student what English has taught them, and you'll hear it: Say what the teacher wants you to say. Pretend you believe it. Back it up with a quote. Move on. Thinking differently is a risk. Thinking originally is a liability.

This is not a criticism of English teachers themselves — many are as frustrated by this system as their students are. But when the entire education system is obsessed with moderation panels, statistical curves, and standardised scoring, what space is left for real thought?

The result is devastating. Students learn to second-guess themselves. They learn that cleverness beats insight. They learn that safe, well-polished mediocrity is more valuable than raw, courageous imperfection. And worst of all, they internalise that school and learning are not about discovery, but about performance. About survival.

Somewhere, buried under all the rubrics and assessment schedules, there’s still a spark that drew many students to writing in the first place. A love of words. A hunger to say something true. A desire to create something nobody has quite said before. But in the machinery of modern high school English, that spark is smothered by the grinding, joyless demand: Please the assessor.

We shouldn’t be surprised when students leave school convinced they are “bad writers” — even if what they really are is bad performers of the narrow script we demanded they follow.

We shouldn’t be surprised when real creativity feels foreign to them.

We taught them to fear it.

Just Because You Didn’t Fit the System Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Write

A lot of people walk out of school thinking they’re “bad writers.”

They’re not.

The truth is, the education system failed them.

When you teach students that writing is about ticking boxes instead of saying something real, you set them up to believe that if they can’t produce a rigid, formulaic piece on demand, they must not be any good. You teach them that their instincts — to tell a story differently, to express an uncomfortable idea, to take a leap of imagination — are wrong. You grind out the very muscle they needed to build all along: the ability to think freely and write with honesty.

It’s not that students didn’t try hard enough. It’s that they were never taught what writing actually is: an act of connection, of risk, of truth-telling.

Instead, they learned to imitate models. They learned to copy structures. They learned that sounding “smart” mattered more than being real.

By the time they leave school, many students have internalised a deep shame around writing. They say things like, "I’m just not a words person" or "I’m not good at English" — as if writing were some kind of genetic trait rather than a craft twisted and warped by an education system more obsessed with standardisation than empowerment.

The saddest part is that most of these so-called “bad writers” could have been brilliant. They could have been the ones whose voices we needed most — raw, messy, breathtakingly alive.

But they were told, over and over, that real writing wasn’t welcome. Only compliance was.

Just because you didn’t fit into the system’s narrow confines doesn’t mean you can’t write well.

It means the system wasn’t built to recognise the kind of writing — the kind of thinking — that actually matters.

High school English was never about nurturing exceptional communicators. It was about manufacturing safe, predictable ones.

And until that changes, we'll keep losing the very voices we should have been fighting hardest to hear.