grading

So it's grading time again. i've never liked grading. At least, given what and who and where i teach these days, grading is not as excruciatingly painful as it used to be, say, 10 years ago. (Has it already been ten years?! It feels, simultaneously, both like a lifetime ago and yet as if time has simply flown by, with no significant interval between the intervening years.) i remember once describing grading in terms of sticking a pair of chopsticks up one's nostrils and grinding them slowly, slowly in the lower regions of one's brain -- and thankfully it doesn't feel like that anymore. But it's never been a pleasure, and i still find myself doing all manner of things to put it off (procrasticleaning, anyone?) -- which of course makes it all the worse given inevitably looming deadlines that loom closer and more urgently the longer you procrastinate.
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i was asked once why grading is such a painful process for me. The person asking the question sincerely could not understand. See, here's the thing: for me, reading is one of the great pleasures of life. Reading a good book can open one's mental horizons, leaving one feeling a sense of expansiveness, of life suddenly becoming richer, deeper, bigger. Yet students often haven't fully thought through what they're writing about. Or they may still be in the process of learning. (That's why they're students!) Sometimes, they haven't mastered the craft of writing -- and various degrees of error appear in their writing. And it's the teacher's responsibility to at least point out these inadequacies, if not actually address them and attempt to correct them, or think of ways to get the students to correct these errors themselves. So grading is essentially a distortion of the reading process: the complete antithesis of all that makes reading a pleasure. Hell for someone who loves to read.

Or perhaps there's a simpler, more honest reason: writing is the thing i do best, and to have to be faced with the thing i do best done by people who do it less well ...
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At least the kids i teach these days are older, and brighter, than the ones i used to teach back in the day. So reading their work doesn't feel like being locked in an endless conversation with a particularly ... well, unthinking ... person, the way it used to feel many years ago. And once in a while, i do get students who are actually good writers and thinkers, and who care about their work. That's when grading becomes a pleasure. And, to be fair, i must admit that i've got more of such students this semester than i did in the past. So that's progress, and something to celebrate, i guess.
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And now back to grading. i have to confess -- if it isn't already obvious by now -- that this blogpost has been basically just another exercise in procrastination ...
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