Something on My Back

Grading is literally the most exhausting thing I have ever done. Given the choice between grading a stack of essays and unloading a semi full of gold bricks, I would take the semi without hesitation, and I would probably have more energy at the end of it.

Sometimes I think it's like a kind of high. After reading the same responses, or their incorrect variations, a certain number of times, a cloud of pressure sets in on my mind, as if the students' responses get filtered into the space between my brain and my skull. By the time I have scored six or seven copies of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Study Guide my grey matter is being squeezed so hard I can barely read anymore.

The other day, having gone through about fifteen ridiculously incorrect responses to a question asking the students to identify an example of allusion in our text, I cried out with glee to see that one student had not only correctly identified the allusion, but had also clearly stated their response in neat handwriting. What a gem.

It's not even that I have trouble with their handwriting, or that I get frustrated by their wrong answers (though sometimes I do), it's just the most monotonous possible task. It requires constant and unwavering attention and calculation (well Devon didn't get the answer quite right answer but at least he supported his claim...etc). On a few occasions I thought about completion grading, but that seems like such a disservice to the students.

If I could just toot my own horn for a moment - It amazes me how little credit teachers get for completing this vital element of their job. Teaching is hard. I put an incredible amount of time into designing lessons and activities that I hope will both engage and challenge the students. And most of the time all I get in return is attitude, sloppy work, and the occasional email from a parent demanding to know why their student is failing my class (The answer is almost always, “Because they have only turned in 50% of the work.”).

But I have accepted all of this, I knew about these challenges going into this assignment. However, what I didn't realize, was that even after all of the work I have put into my lessons, and after the students and their parents give me lip, I have to go home and perform the most mental crippling activity of the lot. I have to sit down in front of the students completed work and pour all of my remaining energy and brain power into resolving the cycle of student work. Usually after a long stretch of grading, I am so drained that I will take a long shower in an attempt rehydrate my humanity.

But by far the worst part is that it is a total time suck. Today I was grading while Mz. Salmon, my host teacher, was teaching her two back to back AP classes. When the bell rang, I looked up to say goodbye to a student that I enjoy talking with every now and again. What I found was that he wasn't there, because this was the period after his class. Not only had I missed the period change, I had not even noticed that the class was taking twice as long as usual. 

However, it's not all bad. Grading is the time that I get to see my students without any of the social filters that apply in the classroom. It's amazing how honest students will be on a worksheet.

Today, grading more poetry analysis sheets, I come across a fantastic to response to the following poem.

Break

Dorian Laux

We put the puzzle together piece

by piece, loving how one curved

notch fits so sweetly with another.

A yellow smudge becomes

the brush of a broom, and two blue arms

fill in the last of the sky.

We patch together porch swings and autumn

trees, matching gold to gold. We hold

the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair

of brown shoes. We do this as the child

circles her room, impatient

with her blossoming, tired

of the neat house, the made bed,

the good food. We let her brood

as we shuffle through the pieces,

setting each one into place with a satisfied

tap, our backs turned for a few hours

to a world that is crumbling, a sky

that is falling, the pieces

we are required to return to.

Little Jeffery Delano (I find myself drawn toward the little guys) has clearly spent some extra time on this assignment as it is written in three different pen colors. Jeffery is quiet in class and I would never have expected the analysis the I am about to read of “Break.”

“It is,” he writes in his spare chicken scratch that I can barely make out, “about how we love perfection.”