04.03.09
Dreading Grading — Loving Teaching
I admit to being less than enthusiastic about grading papers. I assign the due date, making sure that I avoid having multiple classes hand in papers on the same Thursday, which is always the due date because then I have the weekend to get through them.
But this weekend I failed miserably because I have two classes to grade. There are my English 2 poetry first drafts, which are always the hardest because of the errors, and English 1 rewrites, which are easier, but still, I’m staring at a lot of papers right now. And though I don’t have a ruler with me, each pile seems to be a couple feet high. Or is that deep?
And because the first drafts are harder, I start in on the English 2 papers at Rrags, a local coffee house I like to go to so that I remain focused, unable to walk around the house finding other things I could be doing like cleaning out the garage. And I also tell myself to be efficient. If I can take just 15 minutes on each paper, I encourage myself, coach to player, picking up the first essay, it will only take me about eight hours to get through this first stack.
Eight hours!
I try to think neither of the time nor the pay. You see I’m an adjunct instructor of English, which means that I only get paid for the time I appear before the class. The preparation and grading parts are for free — for the college, not for me.
So I begin reading the first paper — the assignment was to write four pages explicating a poem — about the impact of abortion in Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Mother,” and I find myself more than an hour later still writing and thinking about the compassionate, ethical way my student analyzed this poem and the art of Brooks’ poem itself:
Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?-- Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.
At this rate it’ll only take me two more days, if I don’t eat or sleep, to finish just these literature papers. But somehow the stacks of essays seem less high and the pay less important.