Grading. It’s a burden, it’s a bugaboo, it’s a bear. It’s the slayer of weekends. As Macbeth’s Gaelic teacher said, it doth murder sleep. It used to be a pile of papers that glowered at me reproachfully. “Why aren’t you working?” it seemed to say. “You haven’t finished.” Now, it feels like an infinite scroll in cyberspace, hovering over my head like an invisible weight. And yet, if I can escape the feeling of being overwhelmed, it can be — it still can be, even at age 65, after 33 years reading student work, in the fourth quarter of a year of more than 700 essays and 2000 pages — a source of lightness and rejuvenation.
Speaking of her art, the poet Marianne Moore said that “one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine.” And when I find myself and a student in that place for the genuine, that’s when I love my job. The grading of an essay is an occasion, a moment cut out from the regular march of time, an event of heightened consciousness. And though it’s a public act, it’s intensely private. I have told my students that it’s a meeting of minds: I expect them to dig into their hearts and to grope outward into the unknown world in every essay. And as a reader, I expect the same of myself. What makes writing a rite is this commitment of reader and writer to find each other in a place for the genuine.
Sometimes there is nothing genuine in an essay. The student might be too frightened, too stressed, too tired or too lazy to bother seeking out their own authenticity. But with good planning, these problems can be minimized.
More likely impediments are on the teacher side: our own fear, fatigue and laziness. The solution isn’t coffee, though that can help. Rather, we, like our students, may need an attitude adjustment. For those who love tinkering with car engines, that is a self-energizing activity. The attitude with which they approach the work refreshes them psychically. Whereas most of us groan when we pop the hood and stare down at the inexplicable engine. The chore depletes energy before the work has even started. With grading, the trick is to acquire that attitude that makes it energy-producing.
For some years, my trick was to take a moment before tackling a stack of essays and say, quietly, Namaste.
It’s an ancient Sanskrit word and a traditional Hindu greeting: literally, “I bow to you.” But many writers in English, especially the spiritually enthusiastic, get a little carried away with the translation. One yoga teacher offered: “That which is sacred within me salutes that which is sacred within you.” That strikes me as probably fanciful, but it’s a lovely sentiment. I modify it as a pre-grading mantra: That which is genuine within me, may it find that which is genuine within your essay.
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In one way, I feel lucky to be retiring now. I don’t have to figure out how to grade in the age of AI. From my (limited and archaic) vantage point, AI is a tool for cheating that also has some positive uses. In fact, when it comes to cheating, it’s more than just a tool: it’s an inescapable temptation. I don’t know if I could have resisted it when I was a student. The Lord’s Prayer, with a gracious understanding of human weakness, does not say: Give me the strength to resist temptation. It says, Lead me not into temptation. And that’s the problem with AI, you don’t have to be led to it. It’s right there.
How the teaching of writing can survive is beyond me. What I hate most of all is the way it has made me suspicious. When a student does something wonderful, I want to rejoice. But now, the thought intrudes: is it AI? It’s a tragedy. Something beautiful is being destroyed. The teaching of writing using the process model is under threat of extinction. The place for the genuine is being overrun by the ubiquity of slop.
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In my later years as a teacher, I have come to think of myself as a servant of the language. The phrase gives me comfort, and builds meaning into all my work. A former principal used to say, “We teach students, not subjects.” I admired his passion for helping kids, but for me, the two are so wrapped up that I’m not comfortable with seeing it as a choice. Language is what binds us; it’s the ocean in which we swim. Deepening our understanding of language deepens our understanding of ourselves, and each other.
One of the great milestones for the student in English class is the development of what we call “reader awareness”—the ability to look at your writing from another person’s point of view. This mirrors a crucial stage of growth in the human mind: understanding that other people see the world differently, with different prior knowledge and different assumptions. The teaching of writing is the teaching of empathy.
As I get older, I find myself more and more interested in the history of language, and the history of my language. I become more and more aware of the grandeur and the grace of this legacy passed down to us from tens of thousands of generations. I used to say, as I had been taught, that language is humanity’s greatest invention. But linguists have discovered that this is not quite right. Language is an instinct, not an invention. We developed it over the millions of years and the dozens of species that culminated with the homo sapiens. We “invented” language in the same way that we “invented” the opposable thumb. In fact, it invented us.
To be a servant of language is to attune to those most quintessential elements of our species: symbol, reasoning, art, connection. I have been lucky to have this career. And I have been lucky to have so many wonderful students: students who trusted me enough to let me into their inner lives and use me for their own growth; students who have kept me young, hopeful and excited about life.
What I will miss most of all are the moments of connection through a piece of writing. I’m not as gifted in the classroom as many of my colleagues. I’ve never been satisfied with how I lead class discussions. I’m not organized enough. I’m not a master teacher. But I am a servant of the language. I have tried to give the best of myself, and though I have often failed, I have had magical moments of meeting a student within the language. Moments that gave me the energy to keep going and the excitement to keep enjoying my job. Namaste.
Namaste. The word itself bows to us across the millennia and across the curving earth. If you know Spanish or French, you’ll recognize the suffix, te: just like in Hindi, it means “you” in the second-person familiar, as direct object. It’s the cousin of Shakespeare’s thee. The Indo-Europeans — that Stone Age people we know only by the linguistic record — carried this steadfast syllable as it became tu in Urdu, Gaelic and Latin, toe in Persian, ti in Russian and Welsh. Language is full of such connections, and who knows what invisible threads are still hidden to us. Students, when they write, inhabit this structure that is as old as memory, and yet is ever clumped, unclumped, and reclumped together by the collective endeavor of human consciousness. They invite us in. How can we turn them down?
