When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher would assign writing assignments for our class. They would be simple questions, like “What do you do on a rainy day?” or “What would you do if your parents allowed you to stay up until midnight?” While writing these prompts, I would create short stories featuring me, my sibling and a duo of fictional siblings that were our friends. Each of these stories related to the prompt in some way, even if the plot of the story was unrealistic or over-the-top.

One day, my teacher said I was doing the prompt “wrong” and she asked me to rewrite it. I was floored. My nine-year-old mind could not grasp the fact that my creative writing, which is what the assignment was, was wrong. How was it wrong? I was following the prompt. Since I did not want to get into any more trouble I followed the prompt the way my teacher wanted me to.

This experience has lingered in my mind for years. I am currently the head of the Copley High School Creative Writing Club, and I have been for the past three years. I had to campaign for this club to exist, as there was no writing club to begin with and there were no classes teaching creative writing at the school. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only about 47 percent of the secondary schools in the country offer creative writing as a class, compared to 92 percent of elementary schools in the country that offer the class. Why is creative writing so hard to find in middle schools and high schools? And why should you care?

According to Liane Gabora, Associate Professor of Psychology and Creative Studies at the University of British Columbia, the simple answer as to why creative writing is not often taught in schools is that many teachers believe that creativity disturbs the classroom.

“Teachers often have biases against creative students, fearing that creativity in classrooms will be disruptive,” Gabora told The Conversation. “They devalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking, impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.”

This aligns with my experience at CHS. The only instance of a creative writing assignment I remember throughout my high school English classes was a personal narrative I had to write freshman year. All of the other writing assignments were formal academic essays. All essays, all with the same boring paragraph structure of topic sentence, evidence, explanation, link to the next paragraph. Only in eleventh grade did I find that there was some wiggle room with what I was writing, and only in theater class was I allowed to write freely.

While campaigning for the writing club and gathering signatures, I went around to all of the classrooms at the school asking if students would be interested in a creative writing club. The most common response I received during the campaign was, “Oh, I can’t write” or “I’m not a very good writer.” There is a good chance that these students were not bad writers, though—they just never had the proper chance to demonstrate their creativity.

When I was getting the club started, a staff member told me that a creative writing class used to be taught here at CHS. The class was cut because it did not meet state testing standards. This is truly sad—the elimination of a class that would have sparked creativity in hundreds of students and would have allowed them to find their individual voices.

Creative writing has other benefits for students, besides tapping into their unlimited artistic potential and imagination. Writing teaches empathy. As a writer is crafting characters, they must also be able to describe emotions and mindsets of those characters and step into another’s shoes for a time. This can translate to the real world when the writer is communicating face-to-face with another person.

Writing classes can enhance a student’s mechanical writing skills and communication skills. Writing students are often able to more clearly articulate their thoughts and clarify them in a logical way. Writers develop a naturally broader vocabulary, and in turn are able to avoid overreliance on thesauruses and dictionaries. Writing students are also proficient at giving feedback and constructive criticism on their peers’ work.

I believe that creative writing should be more widely taught in middle school and high school and not just thrown by the wayside after elementary school. If it is taught more often, maybe we can promote creativity in the classroom and prevent future little nine-year-olds from thinking their writing is wrong.