9X9X25: Week Three

This last weekend, I read 10 stories at almost 20 pages each. Starting today, my top priority is to read the 36 essays that are 3-5 pages, the ones that were due last week that I haven't had a chance to grade yet. Incoming as we speak, I have 12 short story critiques at a minimum of 1 page each. One of my beloved colleagues stopped me in the hall last Spring and said, "Kristen, is it too late in your career to chance your discipline?" She followed it with a laugh, one of those laughs that soften the truth, one of those laughs that speak the unspoken: English teachers read a hell of a lot.

To be fair, it's not like I didn't know teaching English and creative writing would be like this. Even as a student --and we all know that students complain about a workload that is a fraction of our own-- I struggled to fit in creative writing homework, and reading for my lit classes, and essays, and plot summaries, and whatever other host of writing assignments expected of us. I knew (as many students do not) that if this was the workload for me, each instructor's work was multiplied by occupied seats. It would be unfair if I went into my educational career completely broadsided. Humanities classes have a ton of student work to read. Period.

But isn't it valuable work? Didn't a younger me appreciate it when teachers left laborious feedback in the margins? Didn't a younger me feel gypped when I got an essay back with a number with no feedback --even if the number was a high one?

At the same time, I recognize that not all students are me. Certainly there is a group of students who hate English or creative writing courses, students who don't think Humanities classes pass the "so what" test, students who are just clicking time and warming seats until they get out of my class. These students are people who look at a number in the gradebook (not even a number handwritten at the top of their essay) who have zero interest in reading my feedback, and therefore I've just wasted the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to grade that essay. I find this is the soul-killing part of teaching English: I've just invested my weekend into trying to help you cultivate ideas and to enrich your identity of humanity, but my feedback will go on unread. The other soul-killing part of teaching English relates to essays who write to a page count or a word count. Don't they know we can figure out they've unbroken all of their contractions to milk the 3-page minimum requirement? Don't they know we were students once, too, that at some point we also have experimented with increasing the font size on all the periods to increase the page count?

When I first started teaching, a colleague gave me some sage advice: "You should never be working harder than your students." Maybe that's the answer here: your students are going to college, not you. Your students should be investing outside time in your class and getting something out of the content, not only you. You've been to college. You've gotten your degree. Don't earn your students' degrees.

Do I have an answer for English and creative writing teachers killing themselves with grading? No. Because even though I whine about how much time it takes me to read through hundreds of pages in a weekend, I can't not do my job. We are professionals. We're teachers because we don't half-heartedly do our work. If we were half-hearted employees, we would have gone into a more lucrative field that paid more for less work.You work hard: you know what I'm talking about.

So while I don't have an answer for you, this is what I have instead: Fight the good fight, my friends. When you sit by yourself over the weekend pushing away family and friends, ignoring invitations to go on the art walk or to meet someone for dinner, it's really easy to feel isolated in this job. Don't feel isolated. We're in the trenches here with you. While it's cliched to say you make more of a difference than you know, it's still true. I suppose it wouldn't be a cliche if it wasn't.