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Theories of Grading Writing

Grading my students’ writing is one of my favorite things to do. I love to sit at a table in Charles B. Phillips library (the closest thing I have to an office) and spend a few hours interacting with my students’ thoughts and ideas, fountain pen in hand. It is a sort of meditation and, provided I don’t do too many at once, it leaves me feeling refreshed and energized. However, grading also fills me with a certain amount of existential dread.

The reason for this is the fact that I have yet to solidify a theory of grading with which I am completly happy. The main problem I have in coming up with a theory is the fact that the literature on grading seems to raise more questions than answers.

One of the central issues seems to be the contradiction inherent in taking a piece of student writing and, in the words of Peter Elbow, “summing up one’s judgment of a performance or person into a single, holistic number or score.”

After reading Michael Bernard-Donals’ essay “Peter Elbow and the Cynical Subject,” it seems like the best thing would be to bite the bullet and simply rank my students’ essays and be done with it. They would probably benefit from it in the sense that they would sort of “know where they stand” at all times. Bernard-Donals seems to be saying (maybe between the lines) that we’re all so fu*ked up by the fact of a grade that we make things worse when we try to mitigate the grade while remaining in the university system.

So ok. I should probably just treat papers as much as a scan tron as I can, for the good of all.

But there is a little voice in my head that tells me I could do so much more. If there was a way to reach students on a level that took them beyond being a “cynical subject”, well then I would be doing something really worthwhile. This requires more thought, and possibly more martinis.

opening .wps files

No matter how many times I tell my students not to email their papers in .wps format, I always get a few. As you probably already know, .wps files don’t play well with regular word processers like Word or Pages. The solution is this: go to www.zamzar.com which is a free service that will convert your file from .wps to .doc. It usually only takes a few minutes. I wish I had known about this as a TA.

Troubled Students

Right now I am checking my email every minute or so. Even though I know that it will tell me when I get a new email, I am furiously clicking the refresh button because right now I have a troubled student. Actually I have a couple, but tonight I am concerned about the one.

This student is having what the student describes as personal problems and I can tell from the student’s emails that he/she is suffering from depression. It’s painful enough to think of someone the age of a college freshman having depression problems, but when that student is in my class, I take it personally. I don’t see that there is any other way to look at it. So I email them and hopefully encourage them not to give up.

The problem is that depression, even in a mild form, can be so insidious that there isn’t much anyone can do. When I have a depressed student, I fear sometimes that it’s like a greek tragedy: what makes it tragic is not really the fact that bad things happen but that none of the characters can do anything to stop it. As if it’s my role to be “the concerned teacher” and it’s my student’s role to be “the troubled student” and things will not turn out well.

But I’m not really that pessimistic, so I just keep checking my email.