Grading and Other Currencies for Teachers and Students

by Lucy S.

I am working my way through the final versions of my students’ first essays. At this point, the grading is done, but I’m writing letters with feedback for them.  Doing that makes me sometimes change the grade as I go back through someone’s essay yet again. I’m taking far too long with this process. I end up spending a good 1 ½ hours all together on each essay, sometimes far longer, if my mind feels slow and I can’t begin to think of what to say about strange and problematic reasoning in a paper. One student, for example, writing about slavery as depicted in Frederick Douglass’s narrative, veered off on a moralistic tangent to say that ‘today if you can’t take care of your possessions, you don’t deserve that privilege.’ This was followed with his faith that ‘if you can’t take care of your children, social services will take them and give them the life they deserve.’  (Ahhh… the good life, in the tender bliss of foster care…)  His point was that this was what he thought ‘should have been done with slaves back in the day.’  A grade can’t address the problems in that reasoning.  Whether I give him an A, a B, or a C (I gave his paper a low B), the letter assessment remains mute to a large extent, even with a rubric.  Going back over his paper again to write my letter response, I began to wonder if I should have given him a C.  But what IS a C in freshman comp? What is an A or a B?  I use the rubric, but I could use it for an upper division course or a graduate course and it would be applied differently in terms of the grade.

If I were a math teacher and there were enough time (assuming I had academic freedom), I could make students go back and keep doing a set of exercises until they mastered them. Everyone would get an “A” because it would be unacceptable to move on with the gaps in knowledge that a low B or a C must mean.  If I didn’t have the time or the academic freedom to do this, there would at least be the cut and dry “correct” or “incorrect” of mathematics.  (Of course, I say this in the safety of my distance from actually teaching math.)

How am I supposed to grade these composition essays?  The rubric helps (I don’t know what I would do without it!), but there is still something so subjective and even a bit arbitrary about this. I’ve read enough about the topic to know that the same paper can be assigned different grades by different English professors.

And WHO am I really grading?  Or who SHOULD I be grading? How does a student come to this class straight out of high school, raised in an economically secure two-parent family (maybe even a “happy” one, going by what he’s said), thinking that there should have been a social services for slaves to place them with ‘nicer’ masters?  And how does he think this AFTER reading Frederick Douglass’s narrative?  What went on in his schools, year after year? Or what went on in his family?  Didn’t his parents ever talk about anything of substance with their kids? My three class meetings per week of 65 minutes each cannot replace the many hours each week that his parents or someone should have read to him and had meaningful conversations with him to teach him to think with some depth. (And they obviously have been insufficient, or he wouldn’t have come up with those ideas in his paper!)  I don’t mean to place this all on his parents’ shoulders or imply that it must all come back to the family.  I would like to say that the schools deserve most of the blame, but I can’t blame the individual teachers when they too are caught in a standardized system demanding emphasis on ‘basic skills’ during the hour or so per day that they have their many students.  I suppose I can blame the politicians and various bureaucrats who fund education and decide how it will be structured.  (And I do.) But at a certain point, I feel like it’s bigger than the current batch.  Do I give our society an F?

And so I give him a low B.  And I write my letter that takes far too long, as I read through his essay for the third time – well, not even the third time, because the truth is that I have to keep looking at a paragraph sometimes to decide how to respond. I try to somehow TEACH him – him specifically. I engage with what he has written, because I can’t imagine how he will ever change these ideas if someone doesn’t take them on directly.  Maybe it won’t do any good, but if that is true – if nothing can get through to change someone’s thinking – why do we even bother teaching?

The irony is that I can do this because I’m “only” an adjunct.  If I were a tenured or tenure-track professor, I’d never have the time to focus on each student’s essay for an hour or two, reading, re-reading, writing up letters (for both the draft and the final essay).  If I were tenured, or even just full-time, I’d be teaching three or more classes (five at a community college), reading sixty (or a hundred or more) papers.  But most adjuncts can’t do what I’m doing, either – not if they have no other source of income. The community colleges around here pay adjuncts $3000 to $3500 per course per semester; I’m getting a bit more at $4000. Some states pay their adjuncts far worse. How many classes with how many students must adjuncts teach to make a wage they can support themselves on?

The bigger irony is that it is BECAUSE I make such a low income at this work – my own earned pay, after all the years in school – that I can’t bear to not respond carefully to each student’s work. This – what I am doing now – teaching this class – is the end result of all the work I put in during the past two years of graduate school, and the final three semesters at my undergraduate university (plus the summer that I foolishly spent trying to write my honor’s thesis from morning to night too many days), and the three semesters at that university during my first round there from 2005 to 2007, and my community college classes back in California. This was what I wanted to do, all those semesters and in the many years in between. Well, this and write.  I did once imagine that I could make enough of an income to live on, even if it was just, say, $30,000 a year, or even $25,000… That seems less likely to me now. (Although I do wonder if even $20,000 might be enough…) At any rate, I did what I did in order to teach.  So if it turns out that I can’t even do that as well as I believe it needs to be done, then I will wonder why I did any of this. 

The most I can imagine teaching, if I am to truly attend to students, is two classes a semester.  I suppose I could also teach one or even two during the summer at one of the community colleges, if I could get the work. So maybe I could pull $19,000 or even $22,000 a year, working sixty hours a week at it.  If I could teach two classes with the same readings, I might even be able to cut that down to fifty.  Of course, I could teach four or five classes a semester, if I could get the work. Other people do it. I’d just have to do what “they” (the cumulative bank of received wisdom or at least best compliance with the system) say to do: use a timer and give each essay fifteen minutes maximum. (And keep conferences to a minimum.) 

My friend says he can’t or won’t limit his time with their essays that way, so he gives double. Thirty minutes. He teaches three classes a semester, writes for publication, oversees other students’ projects (master’s theses, honors theses, research projects), and applies for tenured jobs (he is contingent faculty, but not an adjunct).  What does it mean to teach sixty students a semester, meet with them for conferences at least once in the semester (or more), prepare for the classes each week, and read, grade, and respond to sixty essays three or four times in a semester? And there is other writing – drafts, low-stakes assignments… These must at least be read and perhaps even responded to in some way. There are colleagues to talk with, departmental meetings, conferences to attend… He is one of the most attentive, caring professors I know (maybe THE most – I know, because he taught me as an undergrad). What does this take out of a person?  I don’t think I could do it at this point in my life. I’ve learned to be too slow.

I also will not work all summer if I can help it.  It is my time to write, read, grow food, travel to be with the people I love who live far away, and take more time to be with the people I love who live nearby or even in the same house, who I never have enough time for.  Is this wrong? Shall I sacrifice more? I would if it did some good, but who or what would I be sacrificing for? What good would it bring about?

I reject this equation: “I suffer = I am good.”  I am not a masochist. This one may, at least, get closer to a truthful summation: “I actively care for people = I am good.”  At times, caring for people does mean suffering for and with them, but it is the caring that makes us good, not the suffering, right? Aren’t we trying to alleviate misery?  Then again, even trying to evaluate myself as “good” or not so good seems false and hollow. “Good” in comparison to whom, and to what accumulated mass of life experiences? 

I tell my students to turn adjectives and nouns into active verbs when possible to strengthen their writing. Is this true for responding to their writing as well? Is it true for evaluating them?

I tell my students that sooner or later, they will have to not write for grades, and write instead for more intrinsic reasons. They may write to touch and move their intended audience. They may write to express as well as they possibly can something that means a great deal to them. They may write to grow as thinkers and help others learn. But as long as they keep writing for grades, I say, they are writing for something hollow at its core. What is a grade?  It reduces the truth of their work and themselves. 

Justin, my oldest son, says that a student in his textual analysis course (an undergrad literature course for English majors) -- a fellow-student told him he hadn’t even read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (their assigned text for their essays); he’d read the CliffsNotes (supposedly a study guide, but for some students, a substitution for reading the actual book) – and he got an A.  Justin got a B on his essay.  What was being graded, he asked me recently. Spinmanship?  And I wonder: did the graduate student who taught the course set a timer for 15 minutes to spend with each of these essays?

Students do cheat and they plagiarize.  They do it in the chase for grades. Grades are not merely pats on the head. They decide who gains further access to education and other opportunities in a society which creates demand and then makes the way further into these opportunities increasingly smaller. In the process, they can drain the meaning out of the very things people work at. When people struggle, compete, and cheat for a letter assessment that is in itself suspect, what gets lost along the way? 

If, just for the joy and growth of it, I could still study - without grades - with the professor who is now my friend or with other professors whose courses I’ve loved – people I’ve become attached to – or anyone else in or outside of these institutions – would I or any of us pretend to read a book but use CliffsNotes instead?  Would we buy papers or copy and paste parts onto ours for each other to read?

The professor I worked with the most in graduate school oversees a theory group. We meet periodically in coffee shops, during the summer or when he and we have time. No grades, no other reason to be there except to learn and talk with each other.  Do we pretend to do the readings but not really do them?  Of course not.  It would be absurd.   

I tell my students that if they work for grades rather than to learn and create as well as they possibly can, then they will never quite BE in their lives. They will wait for semesters to be over and for summer, and for the end of exhausting hours at jobs in that summer, and soon they will finish college and wait for vacations or until they have a better job, always deferring their idea of their REAL lives to another time. I have given them a copy of one of my favorite passages from a book by Audre Lorde, and I refer them back to this from time to time.

This is my life.  Every hour is a possibility not to be banked.  These days are not a preparation for living, some necessary but essentially extraneous divergence from the main course of my living.  They are my life … I am living every particular day no matter where I am, not in what pursuit.  It's not as if I'm in struggle over here while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living it again (152).

I need her words as much as they do. I will need them today, while I make my way through writing more of the letters, and tomorrow, while I finish them.  This is the only weekend in mid-October of 2013 that I will ever have. These are the only first essays of the first college class I am teaching that I will ever be able to respond to. Maybe this is the only time that someone will be able to ask my student why he thinks social services for slaves makes sense or whether that was what Frederick Douglass’s point was or how any of this connects to his thesis that slavery was first and foremost economically driven. If changing his mind doesn’t matter – and sometimes I wonder if it does – how does any of this matter?  Isn’t it all just a multitude of students with their individual ideas, one by one, all added up into what seems like a mass?

I have also had my class read the trilogy of Zitkala-Sa, who as a Dakota girl of eight was seduced by do-gooder missionaries into leaving her mother and people to attend an Indian boarding school in the East. There, they put into practice the forced Americanization  of one of the founding forces of those schools – Captain Richard Pratt – whose famous goal was to “kill the Indian, save the man.”  In the second of her three articles (published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, when she was only 24), she writes that soon after arriving, they forcibly cut her hair. She’d gotten word that this was coming, so she hid under a bed, but they dragged her out, tied her to a chair, and “gnaw[ed] off one of my thick braids” with scissors. She ends the chapter this way:

In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder (91).

Yesterday, I asked my students what it means to have a moral or ethical response to literature. We’d read an article and story last week which called into question having only an aesthetic response without a moral one.  I asked what we’re doing when we read this literature. Are these merely historical artifacts? Do they have relevance for us now? 

I can’t treat these students as Zitkala-Sa’s mother treated her, reasoning quietly with them, because there are too many, even at twenty, and there is far too little time. But I will resist in the ways I can the role of the herder, driving them like little animals.

The student who wrote the essay with the strange paragraph had to miss class last week for the first time. He told me that he had a wake to attend. His brother’s best friend – and a close friend of his as well – had just died in a welding accident.  This, too, was on my mind as I tried to grade his essay, wondering what quality of thought he’d been able to bring to it in those last days before he handed it in, after the close friend had died and awaited burial.

Now I must get to those response letters.

Works Cited

Lorde, Audre.   Burst of Light Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988. Print.

Zitkala-sa. “The School Days of an Indian Girl.”  American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2003.