As a 12th-grade literature teacher, I am paying for the choice I made to neglect my penmanship – like the once-young drunk who finally, in old age, has to confront the ailing health his habits caused.

When I write on the board, my lines snake around crookedly. Attempts at large block letters parody a kindergartener’s boldest efforts. With sadness, I’ve accepted the possibility that my awful handwriting may distract students and even impede their ability to learn.

A student once wrote me a note at the end of a school year: “I like your teaching, but I think you need to practice your writing.”

I laughed when I read it. I know how to write, I thought. The irony tickled me: I was a writer who struggled, not with writer’s block, but with the physical act of writing. Hadn’t that warped text been my calling card since the third grade? Later in school, hadn’t I even taken pride in it, seen it as a signifier of my artiness, equivalent to eccentric dress or chartreuse hair? I stuck the note to the side of my fridge. But after re-reading it every day for the past three years, I don’t laugh anymore. When I was a student, my bad handwriting was a quirk. In my work, it’s a handicap.

To overcome it, my students and I have had to work together.

Sometimes I type separate sheets of comments and staple one to each student paper. That takes a lot of time and burns through my hoarded reams of paper at an unsustainable rate. Sometimes I email the comments, but not every student has access to email at home. Plus students like seeing the papers marked up. The text-to-text interaction helps them connect specific suggestions and praise to what they actually wrote. When I do mark up a paper, it often looks as if the paragraphs have been gunned down and are hobbling around the page, leaking spurts of red, green, or blue blood. Students have learned to follow up with me in order to decode my comments. I frame this as a good metacognitive exercise in class, something students and teachers should do anyway. “Come see me about your papers,” I say, and many do, slipping in through the open door before school or during lunch to get a better understanding of what I wrote. In doing so, they also learn why I wrote what I did. However brief, the one-on-one conferences help me build better relationships with students, especially those most terrified of writing.

I write little on the board, relying on projections instead. When there is writing to be done, whenever possible, I have students do it, which reinforces the student-driven classroom atmosphere I want to foster. The ancient cliché of the taskmaster teacher ordering students to copy down her military-straight rows of script predates document cameras, PowerPoint presentations, and a heightened emphasis on the value of social learning.