um, señora….?

I like my students, I honestly do. What I do not like, however, is the feeling that comes over me when I am slogging through about 70 student essays. I begin with good intentions, reading each one carefully, thinking about the syntax and paragraph structure and language use, but each essay completed feels like the tiniest drop in the biggest bucket. I'm soon peevish, agitated; my back hurts, I can't find a comfortable position for my feet. I leaf through the remaining essays, counting and re-counting those left to grade. Students' errors begin to feel like a personal affront. Are they confusing the preterit and the imperfect on purpose? Are they not proofreading because they want me to suffer? With each carelessly translated phrase or misuse of ser and estar, I'm less and less certain that I'm teaching them anything at all.

It comes down to too much togetherness, I think. Even more than the usual intimacy of reading, correcting student essays draws the reader into the mind of the writer. As language instructors, we make sense of direct translations of idiomatic phrases and decipher errors common to language learners. Did the student truncate that sentence for stylistic reasons, or was it a grammar error? What to make of the paragraph that breaks off mid-sentence? And why do some students not grasp the concept of audience, failing to edit certain highly personal details? All of this means that students very much inhabit the mind of the grader, and grading essays can seem all-consuming. Despite the fact that student writing involves an exchange of ideas not unlike conversations that would be productive under other circumstances, such as in class or during office hours, grading that writing comes to feel like an imposition when it takes over the non-business hours of evenings and weekends.

Now that my grading is wrapped up for the term, however, I'm very happy to be back to liking my students again. From a respectful distance.