Which Fairy Tale Covers Essay Grading?

Rumpelstiltskin

Rumpelstiltskin (supernatural aid to the rescue)

‘Tis the season to be grading, fa la la la la, la la la la.   Last week I treated you to my stories about student essays.  Today you get to hear thoughts on the subject from Jason Blake, our correspondent in Slovenia.  Jason here searches for an archetypal narrative that will do justice to his own paper grading.  Although Jason is kind enough to say that he’s sure that I wouldn’t want to make use of supernatural helpers as I work my way through what Jason calls “the Pile,” right now such aid seems very appealing.  The Grimm Brothers’ tale “The Elves and the Shoemaker” calls out to me. Wouldn’t it be something to awake and have all these essays graded, along with grammar mistakes noted and clear and succinct comments appended?  One of many tragic instances of how literature is not life.

But as Jason shows, literature gives us resources for dealing with our work life.  He indicates that if one frames one’s challenges within a story framework, the work becomes a bit more manageable.   Try it out with your own job.  What story does it fit and how are you the hero?

By Jason Blake, English Dept., University of Ljubljana

My official job title at the University of Ljubljana was, until a few years ago, “Lecturer of the English Language, of non-Slovenian Birth.” This administrative mouthful was invented just for me and had something to do with employment regulations. Now I have a more mundane title, but my role as General Language Lackey has not changed. My teaching duties range from a poetry seminar, to the vaguely-named “Literary Interpretation,” to the unfortunately-named “Practical English.”

Practical English” implies of course that literature courses must be impractical. This is half a step away from Oscar’s Wilde’s decadent claim that “All art is quite useless” and feeds into my love of reading and commenting on student essays.

At least some of my students believe that reading is useless, or at least monumentally uninteresting. If they happen to enjoy an individual work or an entire course it is a glitch in their belief structure, not a tearing down of their personal anti-reading temple. I’m not judging these intelligent young people, just scratching my head at their decision to pursue an English degree. One reason I don’t binge on sangria is that I don’t like the taste of it.

I once thought this casual drift into studying English was unique to foreign students. Since arriving in Slovenia, however, I have heard similar things from North American colleagues, and even Harold Bloom has claimed dubiously somewhere that few of his Yale students are truly interested in reading. This is a puzzling trend because I doubt there are many parents out there pushing their teenagers into tertiary studies of poetry.

To be fair and clear, some of my students study English against the wishes of their parents and dreams of doctordom and lawyerhood. Also, in Slovenia, literature is only half the English degree battle and many students enter the Program expecting four years of grammar and linguistics, charmingly unaware that there would be “so much literature.” Another Central European curiosity is that if you study English, you study only English – as in 15 English courses a year with perhaps one or two breadth requirements over four years. How’s that for having ticked the wrong box on a college application form?

I obsess about my no-longer-so-new home, though at the same time I realize it is quietly arrogant for me to assume my teaching situation is unique or even special. I forget this daily, and am reminded of it just as often, most recently by Robin’s recent post on essay grading. There he writes, “I love reading and responding to student essays. (Grading is another matter.) I ask my students to write about a work they love, and most of them take up my invitation to explore issues they care about.” I’m on the same page.

Sweetening the essay experience for me is that students are always hungry for feedback. This makes me feel useful as an educator, wanted. Even if my ESL (English as a Second Language) students don’t give a hoot about Wordsworth or Wendy Cope, they are genuinely concerned with improving their writing skills and happy for any stylistic tips or corrections. I’m not sure whether “normal” English teachers get to enjoy the same enthusiasm for comments made. Like Robin, I am thrilled to see students improve, to see “essays rise from D’s to A’s.”

But I also adore the pile of papers—not just the individual essays, the Pile itself. For me, the Pile is almost a living thing. Near in kind to the rush I get when I tear the plastic wrap off a new CD, or pluck an old-fashioned paper magazine out of my mailbox, my love of the Pile is not quite fetishism. There’s some rationality to it. I love the Pile because for once in my teaching life I can hold proof of a student’s thought and progress in the palm of my hand. For once, there’s a solidity and literal weight to what I do in the classroom. A pound of essays feel good and deserves its own term, like a stick of butter or a pride of lions.

I also like seeing the Pile become smaller, which is the same mini-joy I experience when mowing the lawn. There’s a thrill in seeing the end approach, in facing the paradox of the pile in reverse: at what point is the heap of essays no longer a pile? Does nine essays still qualify? (I hear you, Robin!)

I have several quirky little ways of reducing the pile to a bunch. Grading them in alphabetical order. Handwritten ones first. For in-class essays: blue ink ones first; lousy handwriting – that is, males – first. For home assignments: Times New Roman first. Ten more and I’ll watch six minutes of football on ESPN Europe. Mark half of them before breaking for coffee, but don’t stop on an even number or thirteen.

Every teacher plays these games; every teacher has the same concerns with the Pile. These concerns – which are temporarily dispelled as soon as you dive into an individual essay and focus on a young mind in action – do not receive their literary due. I cannot recall a single literary passage devoted to grading papers. Has the Great Essay-Grading Novel yet to be written, or have I simply missed it?

If it’s true that there are only seven stories in the world, then a veiled form of the Essay-Grading Novel has in fact been written. Here’s the beginning of Christopher Brooker’s Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories:

“Imagine we are about to be plunged into a story – any story in the world. A curtain rises on a stage. A cinema darkens. We turn to the first paragraph of a novel. A narrator utters the age-old formula ‘Once upon a time…’”

Brooker deals with our type of story – that is, the one teachers triumph in at the end of each term when they hop in the car and “drive down to” their metaphorical “Tennessee” – in his first chapter:

“Any story which can make such a leap across the whole of recorded human history must have some profound symbolic significance in the inner life of mankind. Certainly this is true of our first type of story, the plot which may be called ‘Overcoming the Monster.’”

Some minor tweaking is required to fit my story into one of the seven basic plots, and the monster need not be a dragon or an eagle pecking at the liver. The beast can also be a mundane task, like rolling a rock up a hill. I identify with Sisyphus when I mow the lawn, though unlike Sisyphus, I generally vanquish the green stuff before rewarding myself with a beer. For a moment, I am crafty Hercules who has just de-dunged the Augean stables.

But feeling like a mythical Greek is hubris when it comes to essay-grading. Though my task may seem never-ending, it is never dully repetitive or painful. There’s thought and freshness aplenty in any stack of university papers, and the only time it drags is when students offer hand-me-down cerebral interpretations that are borrowed and bloodless.

Maybe tortoises rather than Greek heroes are the answer. Don’t some teachers speak of the need for a carapace? Isn’t the tortoise, like the essay-grader, woefully underrepresented in literature? I think that’s called a false analogy, but let’s go with it. That way I can slide in a quotation from Jessica Grant’s superb 2009 novel Come, Thou Tortoise:

I am a pretty powerful tortoise. I walked across the desert once, about a century ago. … All along the way I passed overturned tortoise shells, picked clean by birds. Pretty discouraging. But I kept going. Why. … I remember waking up on my fiftieth or so morning in the desert, having made imperceptible progress the day before, and thinking to myself, Oh God, will I ever see color again.

That’s exactly how I feel when confronting the Pile, though I’m not entirely sure how to apply that “Oh God, will I ever see color again” or the upended reptile shells to essay-grading.

Here’s the archetypal pattern for essay-grading, which is a sub-category of “Overcoming the Monster”: “a hero [that’s me] has to complete a somewhat repetitive, seemingly never-ending task.” Viewed thus, essay grading belongs in the fairy tale world of Snow White. Remember when Aschenputtel wants to go the ball (or “festival” in this ancient translation)?

“What, you Aschenputtel!” said [the stepmother], “in all your dust and dirt, you want to go to the festival! you that have no dress and no shoes! you want to dance!”

But as she persisted in asking, at last the step-mother said, “I have strewed a dish-full of lentils in the ashes, and if you can pick them all up again in two hours you may go with us.”

Then the maiden went to the back-door that led into the garden, and called out,

O gentle doves, O turtle-doves,
And all the birds that be,
The lentils that in ashes lie
Come and pick up for me!
The good must be put in the dish,
The bad you may eat if you wish.

Then there came to the kitchen-window two white doves, and after them some turtle-doves, and at last a crowd of all the birds under heaven, chirping and fluttering, and they alighted among the ashes; and the doves nodded with their heads, and began to pick, peck, pick, peck, and then all the others began to pick, peck, pick, peck, and put all the good grains into the dish. Before an hour was over all was done, and they flew away.”

Very often a magical helper aids the hero in overcoming the task. In Come, Thou Tortoise four-legged Winnifred undertakes the same desert-crossing with the help of four-wheeled magic: “A century later I made that same trip through the desert on the dashboard of a car. Which is definitely the way to go. Takes two days. Two leisurely days.” The car is a less sinister version of Rumpelstiltskin, who arrives to help the maiden turn mountains of straw into gold.

I’ve never wished for a Rumpelstiltskin to come along and help me out with my essay grading, never wished to send my student essays off to be graded by a competent stranger in India. I may sometimes “kvetch” like Robin, but like Robin I’m drawn to the Pile and its oodles of creativity and interpretation.

However, marking vocabulary tests as a “Lecturer of the English Language, of non-Slovenian Birth” is God-awful and no amount of feeling pedagogically useful can change that.

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