Teenagers are terrified of getting things wrong and risking failure, and who can blame them?
I run a lot of writing workshops in secondary schools and what I see is this: teenagers afraid to be creative. Even when I assure them they can’t get it wrong, they pause and agonise and look to their teacher, because they’ve been conditioned to mimic – it gets them good grades, after all.
Teenagers are terrified of getting things wrong and risking failure, and who can blame them? It’s not like being in primary school, when they were encouraged to play. Younger students have no trouble taking a few prompts and turning them into a story, because they delight in creating characters they have control over, and situations that are scary and funny and daring. But teenagers look at the blank page and freeze. “I don’t know,” they might say aloud, while internally their inner monologues say this: If I get this wrong, I might fail this task, which will affect my grade, which will lower my Atar, and I mightn’t get into the course I want, and my life will be ruined. (Don’t believe me? Ask a year 12 student.)
