Grading

by Lucy S.

I will try to write here again. I assign my students writing, but I haven't tried to write an essay since spring of 2013. Well, I've written for the website I made to try to win a union where I teach, but that, too, has all died down for now. Maybe died is the wrong verb; I hope that's all just resting for now while I try to get through my third semester teaching college. I'm teaching four classes at two places. Today I canceled classes because last night, I couldn't get to sleep and was hit be waves of nausea, anxiety, weird-feeling heart rhythms, and was up till about 5 am. So I'm home today on my stolen day of freedom, but there are 20 papers to grade and return by Monday, and another stack of 20 to dive into after that.

I can't tell right now if I love teaching or what teaching even IS. If it's when I'm in the class with the students or meeting with them to talk about something or doing some class preparation, then yeah, I love teaching. But if it's mostly sitting alone with all these papers to grade, I hate it at times.  I don't feel remotely replenished by that work. I don't feel that I'm doing any kind of good when I do it. No matter what mood I'm in when I begin and how determined I am to just go through the papers matter-of-factly and calmly, I slip into one or another kind of despair and outrage at the way institutional education functions.

Those are the lows, and the classroom moments and various moments of humane communication are the highs. Continually moving between these makes me too be so down and up... Why am I doing any of this, anyway? That's the question I can't fend off.  And I don't know why I think that question, because I've mostly believed in throwing myself into whatever I wanted to do as long as I could figure out how to get to do it and not stopping to ask gloomy existential questions instead of just LIVING. But I have such a love / hate relationship with academia or at least my little place in and knowledge of it. This intensity seems in some ways akin to the intensity of addiction.

Addiction is on my mind in part because I'm reading Gabor Mate's book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Writing about one of his patients on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a brilliant but damaged, drug-addicted man, Mate says: "And in his heart he wants beauty no less than I --and, no less than I, needs love." He believes that "at the core of all addictions, there lies a spiritual void" (83). We long to bind to others, to be able to trust each other, to have others listen and care about us and the histories bound to us and yearnings we might share, and to listen well to others, to not disappoint them and ourselves by yet again failing to really connect. When we all fail one another, that void in us grows more hungry and we chase and consume what we can, not always as substitutes, but sometimes as real hope for human connection, and as Mate says, "a search for the eternal [that] extends far beyond formal religious concepts" -- that "immortal essence of existence that lives in us, through us, beyond us" (83).

I try to share at least some bit of humane communication with my students. If nothing else, I hope they leave the classes with far broader and deeper empathy and far more ability to question so much that is passed off as just how life is. I hope they resist believing that they should just accept their miseries because maybe theirs are less pronounced than someone else's, whose miseries they might likewise see only as foreign and unsolvable if they don't learn to question and think hard and connect who and what seems separate.

One day in the prison literature class, while we read about how common it is for women in prison to be raped by male guards, and how few of those guards are prosecuted when there is strong evidence for their guilt, and how of those who are found guilty, two thirds receive probation... we veered into talking about rape culture and addiction. I mentioned that a friend of mine was raped as a young child for five years by her adopted father and that she says the hardest thing is living all the rest of the years of your life with the aftermath. I said she's done well, that she's a writer and is trying to bring more attention to what too many kids and adults still suffer and the mentalities that let it go on. What are those mentalities? Seeing others as objects, as mere resources to use rather than full and equal human beings- having absolute power over others - and keeping it all quiet because it's just not a polite and positive topic?  What lets it still happen so much? I said she says she self-medicates with alcohol, and that for all I know, it's a decent coping mechanism compared to the serious drug addictions we'd read about for others carrying these traumas around. Another student said, yeah, and if marijuana was legal in all the U.S., maybe she'd be able to use that more -- something far safer than relying on alcohol for decades.  On those days, I hope that maybe the students will live as adults who remember these things and do their part to change our society.

I talk to all my students about my desire to make the class a space where we can be kind to each other. I tell them I hate grades. But then I still grade them, and maybe it hurts them even more after I say how much I hate grades -- at least those who want to write better than they do, and who see a C on the paper. Their course grades are higher because I build in many ways to get full points on other things they write or do for class. I hope to soothe their anxieties this way. But still, they face the grade on the paper and some feel hurt. One said on Wednesday when I gave back papers, "A C plus?! That's all?" I winced as I moved on.

Everything in grading feels like a lie to me. Giving them all A's would still participate in the lie. For those who really want to know what I think of their writing, the A would just patronize them. For those who only chase grades - as their schools have taught them to do, because that is what those schools really value - it would just make them bother even less with what we do, knowing that they have the A anyway. Grading a paper says that we can quantify and then commodify someone's written communication, communication that feels to them like it IS them. And isn't it part of them? If not, why do we care if they plagiarize? Why even connect their writing to them at all?

Our society is addicted to grades and other forms of assessing and adding up human beings. And now I am supposed to just accept that this is how things are and forget about any grand desires to change any of it because who am I, anyway? What do I know about teaching?  It's true -- I am unsure of myself in many ways. But then inside the humility or even pained insecurity, my anguish and anger and hope for something better still well up, and I don't quite know what to do with any of it. I can't handle it all alone.

And now I have to grade.