Grading Papers

Yesterday’s New York Times brought notice of negative reactions to the automated electronic grading of not only multiple choice, but even short essays devised for the Harvard-M.I.T. online course. I don’t get computer-graded essays, either. I guess that is because what I always treasured in teaching--as much as I also loathed  it--was my interaction with students and their papers. Yes, grading papers in large courses can be loathsome;  most students are indifferent to general education courses which they view as a tiresome obstacle in the progress to their major field. It sometimes put me in mind of those horror story memoirs of people enslaved to assembly line jobs.  One after another after another, crude, indifferent, shallow, and hurtful to grade because so dishonest all around. Curiously enough, my first experience of college paper writing came about when as a sixteen year old I undertook to write a paper for a  former high school friend at university who was stumped by the assignment; as word got around, this morphed into a kind of industry for the two years remaining until I too went across the river to college, when suddenly the  whore became a nun. The experience, however, helped prepare me as a teacher.  Because I bought back some of of these essays which I resold as “used”, over time I got the chance to read a range of instructors’ comments on the margins.  It stunned me how very superficially most readers/graders treated these student efforts (of course, egomaniac that I am, these were my papers, my efforts).  Of course, it was utterly reasonable for the time; higher education was overwhelmed by veterans on the GI Bill. Overworked instructors were running a paper grading mill, and I was operating a paper writing mill. The experience influenced me years later in my assignment of essay subjects, which I tried to shape as some kind of immediate and close dialogue with what we (I) talked about in class. Smaller classes, however, with a decent assignment of papers, even when the students are not first rate, or perhaps especially so, can be wonderful; the youngsters have so many things to say, and sometimes a very piquant way of expression. There is so much you can do to help students learn to organize and articulate their thoughts.  It is the most satisfying aspect of teaching, and what a world of difference it would make if the student/teacher ratios could be reduced to take account of the potential intensity of serious interaction on an essay paper.  Perhaps the way out is by jettisoning the lecture course, really nothing more than a high class dictée--an educational necessity before the invention of moveable type in the 1450’s which one would think might have run its course. Once when teaching classes with mostly foreign born students, I had them number the lines of their essays, which allowed me to give detailed criticisms keyed to these numbers. I have to admit I practiced triage of a sort for which I might justifiably be criticized. I omitted this tiresome maneuver on the papers of those students I felt were hindered by their age or circumstance of moving upward in the American Dream. But what arrogance was that when I decided that a fifty five year old woman, newly arrived from Albania, say, burdened with her grandchildren, maybe working one or two jobs as a hotel cleaner, did not need to get the niceties of middle class English usage and style  A funny comeuppance came my way one day from an elegant young African who followed his first paper, which had been atrocious, and thoroughly corrected by me, with a second, flawless piece, clearly copied out from some other text.  When I confronted him with this, he quickly acknowledged that this was so, clearly pleased with himself, and to my amazement volunteered that he felt sorry for me, and wanted to hand in something that would be easier and more pleasurable for me to read!  What a gentleman he was, what a gracious demeanor!  You have to love students  like that!