i'm trying to wrap up the portfolios today (grades are due tomorrow, but i still have shitloads of other things to do), and i was reading the personal narrative piece from one girl's portfolio just now, and it was really good. not necessarily in terms of mechanics, etc., but just a really good story. she was writing about how her grandpa died but before that about all the time she spent with him and all of the things that he did for her and taught her that she didn't realize while he was still alive. she ended the paper with something along the lines of (no direct quotes, for obvious reasons) "i wish i could have told my grandpa how big of a difference he made in my life before he died" (not in a maudlin way, but in a totally respectful, reflective, and loving way). it was just a great story and one of those moments that i was just suddenly bowled over by this feeling of how fucking amazing it is to have classes where people will just come in and write this kind of shit. this sort of gut-wrenching, intense, soul-searching stuff that you just sit and read and think "how the fuck am i going to give this a letter grade?"
especially when i've been grading a lot, i get caught up in the whole frustrating experience of "oh, student A has incorrect grammar" or "these margins are too big" or "that's not citing correctly" or "fuck, i said this twenty times in class, why aren't people doing it?"...and it's really fucking hubristic, really. i mean first of all, most of these kids are taking this class because they have a gun to their head to pass it before they can graduate. they aren't going on to be great writers. they aren't going on to master the minutiae of academic discourse. this is the hardest writing class many (most) of them will EVER take. should it be a huge surprise that they're not really that invested in it/are just trying to skate by with a middling grade? for being a person who isn't a huge fan of "playing the game", i sure as hell get pretty insistent that my students play the game sometimes. also, even the ones who ARE excited about doing well in the class, about writing...christ, they're only 18. many of them have NEVER written a paper using outside sources (by their own admission), let alone a paper where they have to use outside sources AND cite them correctly. when i look back and think about how long it took me to write effectively using outside sources...i was a junior in college. a fucking junior. and i expect these kids to just pick it up because, well hey, i know how to do it. they should too.
i'm not saying i shouldn't expect them to work hard. i'm saying that yeah, there are a fair amount of kids who are just slackers, and some are slackers to the degree that it's going to hurt them down the road unless someone like me stands up and says "alright, you can't treat every responsibility in your life like this or you're going to end up working at taco bell forever". but there are a fair amount (probably a greater amount) of kids that are in their first year in college, are decent kids, and are fucking floundering in this crazy cesspool of "academia" that i've finally learned how to navigate a little after 8 years and that maybe we're being a little hard on them. i don't necessarily recommend mercy, but i do recommend patience. i'm going to try to work on that.
it's easy sometimes when you spend a ton of time on a lesson, or on a subject, to get frustrated when nobody seems to pick it up. i mean, that's your work, your time, and all the students do is roll their eyes and text their bffs. but jesus. first, basic composition isn't exactly the most exciting course in the entire world (sometimes mold growing is more fun, especially around MLA time) and second...you really don't have any control over how these students receive their lessons. it's like playing music. i spend hours and hours and HOURS working on songs and practicing. but i've learned and eventually accepted the fact that a lot of times i'm going to upload a new recording or have a show and nobody's going to care. i've had three downloads of my original album in a year. one of the second one in six months. big fucking whoop. but you know, i can't control how other people react to my work. i just have to do my work and be happy with it as it is. insisting on a certain outcome when it's applied to other people (and this goes for teaching too obviously) is just going to lead to disappointment. i can't force my lessons to enthrall and teach everyone through sheer force of will, and even when i try, i just end up more frustrated, more angry, more likely to grade students down for a few little mistakes that i've made a million times myself, and more likely to look at a beautiful story like the one above and just say "oh fuck, that's a C-!!" and throw it on the pile.
and then who's really missing out?
jesus. i'm glad i finished grading before i saw this, though now it makes my attitude about work the last few days seem really hollow. but i suppose your same logic can apply to us as it does to our students - we're still very new at this and we're not going to get it all right all the time. every time we try a new lesson or a new paper assignment or teach during a new time frame (TR, for instance), there are going to be things that we're going to fuck the hell from and really, we can't be expected to do any more than that. and those shouldn't mean that we're in the wrong profession or somehow incapable of this job.
ReplyDeleteeven though i'm not a huge fan of playing the game either, it certainly has a place in education. yes, it is really hard to grade someone's self-expression, especially if it moves us in some way, but until we get to move up the ranks and teach something besides what many classify as a skills-based course, our hands are tied.
i like your "patience" rather than "mercy" view. it's not going to do them any favors in the long run if we pass them insufficiently prepared to deal with other courses and teachers with less open views of errors. but it's not going to do them any justice either if we get bogged down in all the minutiae and stop paying attention to the big picture, as you've pointed out.
i work with this one guy who treats composition like a literature class and is only concerned with grammar and mechanics. every peer review day his students sit in complete silence and appropriate each other's work by fixing sentence structure and changing words. i had one of his 110 students in my 120 class this semester, and it was so hard to work with someone who had learned at this institution that those things mattered more than content or ideas. i'm obviously very much on the other side of things, but then i get to research papers with abhorrent sentence structure and i wonder where - or even if - i went wrong.
balance, i suppose. i'm going to balance some lunch in my hand and then my stomach.
nice (just to your comment in general). a lot of the stuff we were bitching about last night was on my mind too when i wrote this.
ReplyDeleteand of course you're right about us still learning too. i mean, that's why i got into this profession in the first place; was so that i'd have a job that i could still be learning how to do when i'm 60. that's what i want. but, i think we (or at least i, not speaking for you) are/am finally reaching the point where i've done this enough that in some ways i reflexively feel like i know it all and i treat it just like any other job in that i start responding robotically to a lot of things.
i think i'm finally learning that just because it's a job that you CAN keep learning about as you go, that doesn't mean it's going to force you to learn. you've got to be motivatated to do that yourself. i suppose i should have known that already...
I struggled with grading a lot. I found that the easiest way for me to to it was to be completely systematic, i.e. if they had this many mechanical errors, they lost this many points. It was a struggle though when I could tell they really tried. It was also a struggle when it was obvious that they didn't try. I guess this is where the patience comes in.
ReplyDeleteOh, and I was also super critical in the beginning. I've found that scaring the shit out of students gets them to produce higher quality work the next time.
Another oh. Loved your remarks about the cesspool of academia. That's what's blocking me from going on for a PhD right now. Ick.