*Pause to hunt down interestingly-coloured pen.*
Essay 1 - Two sheets of paper. One of which is the cover sheet. For a 2000 word essay. Huh. Oh, no, it's just in REALLY tiny font. I'm putting this one back in the pile, my eyes can't deal with that at 11pm.
Essay 2 - What is it with students inventing their own paragraphing system? Loads of mine do this two-tier thing, where a blank line means an actual new paragraph while a line break means, I don't know, a change of subject within the paragraph or something. It's really curious. But this is an interesting essay - no real argument, no clear train of thought on anything, but clearly written by a student who really likes poetry and wants to talk about how it sounds. This is the kind of student whose grade could go up a lot in essays to come.
Essay 3 - This one worried me. It's a close-reading of a poem in which the student's chosen the most negative, bleak, life-is-nothing interpretation of everything, to a point beyond misreading (e.g. the poem mentions 'a town', and the student writes that not naming this town contributes to the apathetic and boring feeling of existence the poem describes... and on, and on, for a whole essay). Yeah, this one goes into the Discuss With A Colleague pile.
Essay 4 - Wow, this one can write. I am so impressed by how confidently some of my students write when it's their first university essay; I don't think I was anywhere near this brave. (Although, here's a frightening thought - I was having lunch with the person who taught me first-year English as an undergrad the other day, and he remembered which short story I'd written on for that first essay. ERK.)
Essay 5 - CONGRATULATIONS STUDENT for getting every single presentation category ticked in the 'unsatisfactory' box! This takes real dedication. Ignoring the stylesheet and all my advice risks getting one right by accident; this, my friends, is skill.
Essay 6 - I feel a little sorry for students who've spent however many years at school being taught how to write a book report, and then get to university where their book report is going to get the same grade this one will. It's a pretty good book report, too.
Essay 7 - This is odd. It starts off without an argument, it continues for a long time without an argument, and then it sort of picks up an argument without realising it on page 3. Your subconscious already wants to write literary criticism! Trust the Force, Luke!
Essay 8 - This was brilliant. Really brilliant. But so cautious! Half an essay written in the form of "Possibly this is going too far but it occurred to me possibly that in my opinion maybe it could be argued that [really insightful point here]." Whoever this is (all our marking is done anonymously), I wish they'd start sitting next to the student who wrote Essay 4.
Essay 9 - If you're not sure what the question means, then adding "This proves how [question here] is true" every fifth sentence is probably not the way to go.
Essay 10 - Oh, the dreaded essay written by the exchange student whose English really isn't up to essay-writing level. I feel mean telling them off for this as if it's something they can just Work Harder At - it's truly not their fault that the language-proficiency tests done with some of the exchange universities are really not up to scratch - but, all the same, I can't even understand what this one's saying half the time.
Interesting post at the (seriously compelling) sociology blog Scatterplot on the subject of academic citation:
I’m not sure any “necessary evil” part of this job feels like a more pointless waste of time than when I’m searching on the web to find where a book publisher is located so I can fill in the [city] field in the sociology citation format. I wonder when was the last time that a single human being anywhere in the world used that information for any purpose whatsoever.
Plus, the corollary frustration of explaining to students (especially students who've never had to do any kind of referencing or bibliography before, which seems to be most of mine) why we make them do such pointless-seeming things as well. Because it's the way academia works, and it's about consistency and clarity and that works better if everyone's doing it the same way, yes, okay, I know that History and Politics make you use a different system, but this is the system we use in this department because it's about - I mean, we need to know the - well - look, because I say so and I am marking your work, all right? All right.
This was going to be a generalised, non-identifying, pedagogically sound rant about my students, because some of them have been really pissing me off recently. I taught one class on Friday afternoon (yes, yes I was last in line when the scheduling got sorted out, and through nobody's fault but my own), which I was not expecting to go well: only half of them turned up last week, most of the ones that were there expressed shocked disbelief over the idea that I'd expect them to read a novel right through to the end, I'd set them extra work on top of that which wasn't going to be assessed, they'd been slipping back into monosyllabic answers over the past couple of weeks, it was raining, and I was ill. This does not suggest good things. So I thought oh, well, if this goes as horrifically as it's probably going to, I can at least feel (mostly) justified in grumbling about the whole thing on the internet.
So naturally, they all turned up with the book, having done all the reading and the extra work I set, and talked enthusiastically about the novel for the whole hour in a thoughtful and detailed way. Now I feel really bad about even thinking of grumbling about them.
I'm still ill, though. Curses.
SCENE: My students, packing up their stuff. (Well. Half my students, packing up their stuff. God knows where everyone else had got to.)
Me: Oh, and when I say we're doing [X novel] next week, I mean we're doing all of it. So you do need to read the whole book, up to and including the end.
(But they know that, right?)
Students, in unison: What, really?/All of it?/*sigh*
(Wrong.)
Overheard on the bus back from campus this evening.
Student A: "...so I told my mother, and she went mad."
Student B, laughing: "Well, you really fucked it up."
Student A: "She knows... Yeah. She knows my grades are all right. My other grades. So I said I just, I don't know what happened that class, but it's - I said it's my fault, anyway. So she knows."
Student B: "So is she going to do it?"
Student A: "She went mad at me for about half an hour -"
Student B, interrupting: "You should just have said your grandmother died or something."
Student A: "No, right, because my flatmate says if you do that they ask for a death certificate."
[Student B nods sagely.]
Student A: "So she says, anyway, she says she'll write them a letter saying I'm telling the truth, but she won't do it again. 'Cause otherwise I have to repeat the whole year or something."
Student B: "She's telling them -"
Student A: "Yeah, family emergency, something. If they still don't believe me it goes to the Academic Council."
Student B: "Oh, yeah, they will. Right, I missed the exam in first year, and I told my tutor I had a drink problem - I went to his office all shaking and everything and said I had a drink problem, I hadn't drunk at home."
Student A, laughing: "Did he believe you?"
Student B: "Yeah! He gave me the number of the counselling people and everything, he was dead nice about it. He said I could always go and talk to him."
Student A, still laughing: "Aw, that is -"
Student B: "I was shaking and everything. Milking it, right?"
Student A: "Right."
Ai.
My students spent most of this morning's class talking to each other. I love it when this happens; they pick up the discussion and run with it, and I just referee and gently swat them back onto track occasionally. And they're so polite about it, too. All "No, I see what you're saying, and I respect that, but where I'd disagree is..." and "Yeah, I do think that's valid, I just think we need to take this into account as well." I wish I knew what kind of things triggered this so I could set it going in every class - while I'd like to claim it's all due to my teaching, it's really the students who deserve the credit for this - but I've never been able to work it out. Some particular group dynamic, or some subject they've got personally invested in, and my introduction works like a touchpaper. The existence of moments like this is one of the things I'm happiest with about my teaching, although it's ironic that my greatest successes are the times when my students probably wouldn't even notice if I got up and left the room. Still, teaching is about them, not me.
To balance this out, the bus ride home felt like the driver had a cloud of bees around his head, and I got thrown out of my seat (and into one of the guardrails) twice. This morning's bus driver gave me all my change in coppers, too. Either I've offended a bus driver somewhere, or I've offended Grumpio, God of Busdriverkind.
From this Guardian article on the murders at Virginia Tech:
[Lucinda Roy] had removed Cho from a poetry class in November 2005 because his behaviour and writing frightened fellow students, as well as his professor, Nikki Giovanni. "There was something about his anger that made me think it just wasn't someone writing. It was a deeper place where it came from," Ms Roy said. "I just thought, here is someone who doesn't have much to lose." She notified campus counselling services, the legal department, and the dean of students about Cho. "He seemed incredibly depressed. He really needed help," she said.In a sense, it's just a lengthy if-only. To think that a crime like this was nearly prevented is consoling, somehow, and if someone was concerned enough to take a writing sample to the police, then it's much easier to think of this as a 'nearly'. And it's difficult to imagine academic staff taking student work to the police unless that work was so clearly the sign of psychological illness and of a potential threat. On the other hand, is it ever that easy to tell?
She also asked campus police to review the writing sample which had disturbed Ms Giovanni. The police were responsive, but Ms Roy said there was little they could do because Cho had not made direct threats [...]
[Another professor, Edward Falco] said: "Periodically you get very violent writing. You get writing that is misogynistic, that is hateful. You have to deal with that. What is lack of craft, and what is a reflection of psychological problems - these are not easy to discern."
Student creative writing can be a very strange thing. Not all potentially disturbing material implies something's wrong with its author, and young writers tend towards extremes anyway, because... well. Because they're stretching their writerly wings, I suppose, and because they've yet to learn the power of understatement, and because why write a touching and poignant conversation between parting lovers when you can get your TA to mark acrobatically explicit sex scenes instead? ("You're overusing exclamation marks here. Also, I think one of your protagonists would have sprained something by now.") And sometimes they come across as angry or angsty or downright weird, but a lot of teenagers are angry or angsty or downright weird, and most of them don't hurt anybody. Still, there's standard creative writing eccentricity, and then there's the work that goes beyond 'eccentric'. Most academics haven't taught mass murderers, but I bet lots of us have taught students like 'Pete'.
'Pete' was in my first-year class a few years ago. Smiled a lot, sat at the back. A few of the girls stuck to him like remoras and giggled at every joke. He was a handful without being too difficult, and so long as the limelight shone on him for a few minutes in every class he wouldn't be too disruptive. But Pete was there for the credit, not the books, and when it became clear English wasn't the easy ride he'd hoped for, Pete started resenting both the work he had to do and the fact he had to do it. He wasn't happy when I said I would no longer be marking him present if he turned up to class without his books; he was even less happy when his first assignment got the fail it deserved. And he didn't like me much.
Pete's second assignment was a creative response piece, and the most disturbing student work I've seen so far. It was a re-writing of a text we'd already studied in class, but it had little in common with the source material except for the female protagonist's name: in this version, she was kidnapped, graphically tortured, and broke free to start killing and torturing people herself, including her mother and various men. I say she had the same name as the protagonist in the source material, but she was only called that once, in the first paragraph, and described just as 'the slut' or 'the whore' after that. I didn't know what to say about it, let alone what grade to give it. I still don't, really.
I don't think Pete was a danger to me or anyone else in the class. I think he was a brat who was trying to shock me. But I remember meeting him in the corridor the day that assignment was due in, and stepping out of his way as he sprinted past to get to the office before the deadline, and how he laughed and waved hi to me when he was holding that story in his other hand. Only a tiny, tiny minority of students will be murderers, but they're all people, and sometimes they won't be the kind of people you'd want to be left alone with. Still, there's never going to be a way to tell the unpleasant ones from the disturbed ones from the truly dangerous ones, based on their writing alone. How would you ever know?
A student, at the start of a close-reading exercise on some 'modern' (ha) literature: "That's really sexist language. And it was probably sexist even in 1995."
Objectively, I already knew that most of my students were born somewhere around 1986. Objectively. But nothing will bring it home to you more speedily than realising that while for you, 1995 meant writing Bon Jovi lyrics in the back of your geography book and quoting Clueless beyond the point of human endurance, for your students, 1995 is another country and they do things differently there.
(Although, we did buy Robson and Jerome singles of our own free will. Maybe it was another world after all.)