04.03.09

Dreading Grading — Loving Teaching

Posted in Education, English at 11:29 am by Dave Badtke

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.

03.27.09

John Hope Franklin

Posted in People at 11:40 am by Dave Badtke

03.25.09

Education: Relationship v. Consumption

Posted in Education at 12:12 pm by Dave Badtke

02.28.09

Debt vs. GDP: What Should It Be?

Posted in Business at 1:42 pm by Dave Badtke

02.27.09

Ant Sex: Girl Gangs Gone Wild!

Posted in Science at 9:58 pm by Dave Badtke

02.15.09

Frank O’Hara Fan via Stephen Greenblatt & Zadie Smith

Posted in Literature at 2:46 pm by Dave Badtke

02.14.09

Dream City: Zadie Smith on Obama

Posted in Society at 6:00 pm by Dave Badtke

01.30.09

Billable Hours

Posted in Law at 1:14 pm by Dave Badtke

Spectacular Night Sky

Posted in Astronomy at 12:07 pm by Dave Badtke

01.26.09

Maya Angelou on the election

Posted in English, People at 8:19 pm by Dave Badtke