The tightrope

I had completely forgotten that today was change the clocks day until my sister reminded me about an hour ago. My god, what a relief! It means I can still take a little more wind-down time and yet get to bed earlier than I anticipated. It's another "up at 5" week for me--at least for a few days. Grading revisions is a lot easier (usually) than grading the first ones, as I don't have to explain as much (usually), but it still takes time--and I still have 36 papers to go by Tuesday. Even at four an hour (a hugely accelerated pace for me, and not always possible), that means finding an additional 9 hours of work time in the next 36... Meanwhile, my patience and Zen-like calm are fraying rapidly, particularly in the face of the way some students chose to fulfill one of the assignments. I had them write a report on my comments on their papers (specifically not calling it a response. though that's still what I got from a lot of them). The idea was for them to show me 1) that they understood what I was telling them they needed to do and 2) that they understood what to do to fix the problem. I feel compelled to quote two of the responses verbatim:

Student 1 [my comments in brackets]: "The comments that I have received back on my paper were helpful. [And yet she followed none of them.] I thought that you were trying to make me understand that was [sic] no point to my paper. Well there was, [says you] but just not a clear one. I was unable to fix that part of the essay because of lack of time, considering my new job has completely taken over my life. Anytime I am not attending school, I work, therefore I have lacked in school work and my grades ave [sic] slipped. [OK, so we see where your priorities are.] Anyways, I had plagerised and I fixed it. My grammatical errors were small but they were also there. I fixed it. But the main point of the one on one conference was to get a better understanding of how I could make my paper better. To be totally honest, it probably would of [sic] made more sense if I liked and was in [sic] the topic given. Being that the essays were a little boring, it made me not take the paper serious and just write whatever just to get it over with. [And boy do teachers love hearing that.] I am not happy with the way I went about writing this paper. And since this analysis part was missing, I probably failed it anyways. But here I am writing it because I would rather get a C rather than an F. [Again, something teachers love to hear.] I promise to work ten times harder on my next paper, considering how serious papers are taken in college. Sorry about the inconvenience." Inconvenience??

Student 2 [again, my comments in brackets]: I understand what you mean by looking deeper into the essays, but I have a lot of trouble doing it. I'm more of a literal person. [Apparently she doesn't understand that paying attention to details and specifics is "literal."] I added the "physical importance of nature" paragraph because I feel that it was important to prove my point. Nature provides the essentials for life on a deeper level, but the physical level is there too. [And yet her point was supposed to be to explain what the authors of the readings are saying, and neither of them talks about the importance of nature to our physical survival. But in her estimation, because she wanted to say it, it's worth saying, and I'm just too stupid to see its validity to her argument.] I corrected the 'misread' and 'not necessarily true' portions." She corrected them partially, perhaps, but nothing else. She changed about 10 words total, across five pages of "revision."

I grant you, these two students are the exception, but after the rush of anger I initially felt (you truculent, arrogant, ignorant little snots), I thought, "OK, let 'em go. If they don't care about learning anything or don't believe I know what I'm talking about, they have three choices: they can drop, they can do what I ask, or they can continue not to do what I ask and get the grades that come with that choice. Their decision; no skin off my nose."

Still, I am waiting for student 2 to turn up in my office to complain about the reduced grade on her "revision" (reduced because, well, the assignment was to revise, and she didn't; she's actually lucky I didn't flunk it).

Most of the students' revisions consisted of a few changes that don't go very deep, but they're very new at this, so I'm not surprised or unhappy. Conversely, I am delighted when I run across the papers that are genuine revisions, with actual, real live rethinking and reworking going on--and usually a better result. I know they'll be frustrated that their grades don't suddenly rise to A's (and some don't rise at all--though at least they don't go down), but a few made significant enough changes to raise their grades quite a bit.

Doing this, however, I always think "Damn, I need to give lower marks on those first versions so I have somewhere to go with the second ones." I also tend to mark a little high with the first batch of papers (though I'm sure the students would be shocked to hear me say so): I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because, if I were to give them honest appraisals, I fear they'd be so discouraged that more of them would disappear and sooner. I truly do not want to chase them away or make them feel despondent. It's this tightrope walk, always, between providing encouragement and telling the truth about where they are. Seriously, I wish I could teach and never, ever have to assign a grade. Just providing an evaluation would be hard enough, as even then I'd have to say to a lot of them, "This is not good enough for this level. You are not where you need to be to succeed." I'd much rather build from wherever they are and not have to measure them against any external standard. This is why I used to love tutoring in the Writing Center: I didn't have to measure, I only had to help. And that part, I love.

Here's hoping I can hang on to my patience and not get insanely crabby while I crank through those 36 remaining papers....