the grade vacuum

I do not live in the town where I teach. When I admit (?) to people that I commute from Cincinnati to Oxford in order to study and teach at Miami University, I receive either a.) sympathy (the drive is a little dull), b.) condescension (who would EVER want to live in a city!?!), or c.) censure (you must waste a lot of time and money...).

While response b.) irritates me to no end, it's response c.) that I have the most trouble wrapping my mind around. I mean, sure, gas is expensive. And yeah, I could use the hour and a half it takes me to get there and back three times a week. For a girl who used to run six miles, four or five times a week, yes, the commute can be a real drag. But to me, the time is well-spent thinking. Maybe I'm a little biased, but I sometimes feel that time to ourselves is the first thing that goes when we get busy. Remember when you were a kid and you had hours to imagine? To be curious about the world around you? To wonder how things worked? To contemplate "what's inside that old clock radio" and then take it apart? Gone.

So far this post is taking a rather circuitous route to my main point, which is about grading and response. I spent my drive home today (with my arm out the window--finally, a good driving day!) thinking about the absolutely, completely flawed way students and teachers interact about grades.

Today I returned a long paper to my students. It was a long process on both ends: them writing and me responding. They worked incredibly hard on these papers. They spent weeks germinating their ideas, planning their essays, drafting, getting feedback from peers, trying new styles of writing, etc., etc., etc. We even took time to create a rubric together. They determined what mattered to them in terms of evaluation and we developed a series of criteria for their work. And, without overstating my own contribution to this process, I hope, I spent a good deal of mental energy reading and thinking about their papers. I read them twice, thrice, sometimes even four times in order to make as informed a response as I could.

So, we both go through this process and then BAM. Today I gave them their papers back. And that's the end of the conversation. As students, they get some feedback about their papers. If they want, they can talk to me about my comments and/or revise their work. But for the teacher, that's it. We never know how our comments "went down."

Grading is such a sticky business in the first place. It's absolutely subjective (and anyone who tells you otherwise is a bald-face liar) and it's painful and it's awkward and it's stressful (not the reading, mind you, the responding--you want to say it just right) and then it's over and you never really know if it was any use at all. I hate that. In my opinion, the vacuum that's created when the papers leave the teacher's hands and go to the student's is the source of a lot of teacher burnout and frustration. It's like a boomerang that never returns. You just wonder where it went.

The class I'm teaching now (English 225) is one of two courses required by future English teachers. I sometimes feel that I should raise these issues in class, that we should all talk about grading as a process. They're going to have to do it, too, and they're going to feel just as conflicted as I do. As all teachers do, I think. Why don't teachers ever talk about this issue? Even typing it out right now seems weird, as if I'm supposed to "know" that my comments are helpful. Teacher as authority--what a farce!