Grading Essays: A Guide To Detachment

"For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays."

-- C.S. Lewis, The Horse And His Boy

I'm up late in order to experience amazement at the ridiculously bad officiating in the Green Bay - Minnesota game as well as to grade about a gazillion papers I foolishly promised I'd have finished tomorrow.  (Young teachers: never promise this.  Instead, look stern and guiltless, robe yourself in awful majesty, and refuse to explain why it's taken you this long to grade their work.   Trust me.)

When you grade essays in America in 2001, it's a good idea to compartmentalize.  

I mean you have to not give a damn about anything that makes life worth living, or you'll never finish.  You have to become a sort of machine that ticks off comma splices, run-ons, misplaced modifiers, and the presence of a thesis (however lame-brained) with the detachment of a Zen monk.

At the end of the essay, you find some little trinket of positive reinforcement to toss at the writer:

+ Good use of personal example re: the butter and the clown.

+ Has anyone told you that your use of Times New Roman 12 is exquisite?

+ Radical and daring conclusion about legalizing marijuana!  I didn't see that coming!

Then you sum up your cryptic symbols in the margins of the paper, your signals about what it is that the student "must work on:"

- Learn the difference between a comma and semi-colon;

- Paragraph more effectively using stronger topic sentences;

- Turn in a bottle of tequila, please, with your next work if you do not learn the difference between "everyday" and "every day."

It should all be neat, orderly... detached.  A series of positive affirmations mixed with a critique of the writing.  A list in +/- form is sometimes helpful.  More often this turns into a short paragraph on strengths and weaknesses.

So long as you don't really give a damn.

Once you allow yourself to care about anything in the essay, once you allow the student to make a personal, real, true connection to you, kiss your weekend goodbye.  You'll write as much in the margins as the student has written in the essay.

I don't want to brag, but this is how I work: as an undisciplined emotional trainwreck.

With severity I limit myself on the first few essays: an evaluation of a brand of lip-gloss; a celebration of the merits of the four-cylinder engine over the V-8; an analysis of the merits and demerits of Law and Order: SUV [sic]; a thoughtful examination of the possibility that a certain college football team will go all the way all leave no real mark upon me.  I sum them up quickly:

NICE JOB:

+ Good use of first person example;

+ Nice mixture of sources;

+ Fine paragraphing.

TO WORK ON:

- Comma splices;

- Fragments;

- Punctuation;

- Specificity of detail.

A neatly lettered grade at the bottom tells the tale.

Gradually, though, I start to lose my way. 

I'm not sure whether it's that discipline is like sandstone gradually worn away by the drip-drip-drip of inane and inconsequential prose, or it's just that (as I suspect) some freakish guardian spirit has arranged that the essays will gradually take on a different character as I make my way through the frowning stack that now sits next to my dog, next to my right foot, waiting (like the dog) for my attention.

Lip-gloss gives way to a striking essay on whether the death penalty for adulterous women is just.  This one leaps off the page at me, and I find myself writing in BLOCK CAPITALS about Old Testament history, correcting a fact about property rights among the Israelites.   I raise my academic eyebrows at sexist language, inflammatory rhetoric.

I call myself back to order, remark upon:

+ Very good paragraphing;

+ Provocative thesis!

+ Good separation of your voice from research.

but

- Disappointing factual failures;

- Punctuation;

- Its / it's and there / they're / their.

The next essay is on horse-feed, and this blessed student has gone so far as to taste the damned stuff in furtherance of her essay's clearly stated aims and goals.

I cannot resist this, and develop a crush on this student's mind without any preamble, a crush worked out in the margins:

No, seriously?  You really tasted it?  That's just awesome use of details, here, especially the part about the "musty sweetness" of the molasses coating.   It makes me think of breakfast cereals coated in sugar or something.  GREAT transition from the casual detail of you tasting the feed to the paragraph on crude fat and fiber.  Freaking awesome.

I might as well send the student flowers and chocolates (or alfalfa), but, sadly, a relationship not founded on honesty cannot survive, and so:

- Comma splices are common;

- Frequent tense shifts.

And so it goes.  Lure after lure, essay after long, rambling essay draws me in.  I can't leave it alone.  I tell myself I can quit and return to my Spartan comments, but when I find myself engaged in the margins in a furious debate about the merits and demerits of (I'm not making this up) a plus-sized bra, I know I'm a disaster.

I don't even bother informing that writer that she is:

- Missing details about the advantages of the back clasp.

I just ink the grade and think, "The next one will be a model of economy."

But the next one is from a student whose first essay was a harrowing narrative of her betrayal by her parents.  This one is about God.  And a few lines in, I read this lonely paragraph, slightly edited to protect the writer, but with grammar left as it came to me:

Often times I struggle trying to incorporate my ifestyle and the lifestyle of others.  I don't do this because I need approval from friends, but I do this because everyone needs someone to talk too, I have never been known put a person before my religion.  They often keep their distance from me, because they are afraid I might have an opinion on what they are doing.  Rejection is something I am very familiar with.  God is the only one who will never fail me.  It's not asking too much to be alone.

The essay is a monument to the idea that one must take a stand sometimes. 

I read it through three times before I'm even able to bring the blue pen to the white page to correct "too" to "to" and to signal a comma splice (there are six in the essay's first paragraph).

I think of writing a comment in the margin to correct the distortion about God's love as being somehow in opposition to the strange rambunctious morals of her friends (which I know from her first essay must be terrifying to her).

But no words come. 

I should say something.

I write something.

I cross it out.

It's getting later.  It's almost midnight, and I'm not half done.

I stare at this page as though it were some strange scripture, as though this moment mattered more than all the others I'll see today.

And I'd like to say that I wrote the right thing at the end, some jewel of insight or some aphoristic healing thing that would transcend the inevitable grade of "D" that the paper was going to earn.  But really, it just came to this:

- Too / to

- Comma splices: let's do something about that.  See me.

- Paragraphs need stronger topic sentences.

+ I read this three times before grading it.  Thank you.

Comments

[Victoria]

I haven't even read this post yet, but kudos on the quote at the beginning. I think of that every time I have to write an essay.

[Jen]

In a way, it's a privilege, isn't it?