Thursday, May 13: natural appeal

“The teacher teaches the student to teach himself.”

Correction: the teacher teaches the student to grade himself. Or herself. Today is day one of what will likely be two and one-half to three days of grading to complete my semester. The good thing about end of the term grading: I don’t have to leave comments—as long as the students get passing grades, they generally don’t care what I have to say—and they really don’t care what I have to say when the semester is over. I will read their work—reading it is fairly pleasant—it’s the evaluation stuff that sucks.

If I could let them assign their own grades they would likely be worse than the grades I would give them. Students are very hard on themselves—they almost always underestimate their abilities and set standards for their writing that make no sense. They think good writing is merely the function of a series of appropriate grammar choices, and since grammar is a challenge for many of them, they think they are bad writers. But I have never read anything and thought to myself, you know what makes this argument convincing? The use of punctuation. I wasn’t sure about the whole thing until that final semi-colon. Dang, that sealed it.

What they don’t seem to get, no matter how many times I tell, show, or attempt to exemplify, is that I just want to be able to read what they are writing. I want them to get their ideas to the page in a manner that someone else can understand. The clearer their writing, the faster I read it (because I am not constantly stumbling, re-reading, and yet wondering what I read). And the faster I read it, the happier I am (because the grading pile is disappearing and non-grading time in my day is appearing). And the happier I am, the higher their grade (because I understood what they were writing quickly enough to still fit in a walk to Starbucks).

Now that I am at the end of this post, and since I’ve run out of other distractions, I’m diving into my (digital) stack of essays. They may not all get the grades they want, but they will likely get grades a little higher than they deserve, and a lot higher than they think they deserve. And if I can do all that and still want to do it all again come August, I’ll give myself a B. And a grande Vanilla Sweet Cream nitro cold brew with mocha drizzle and powdered sugar funnel cake topping.