Anyway, I don't think I've mentioned this here yet, but the local newspaper is actually paying me to write a monthly article for the "Classrooms" page. I have a spot the 4th Monday of each month. They are paying me all of $40 per article. That's cool, but when I do the math, figuring in the number of hours per article, it's probably around minimum wage.
I would appreciate your prayers for wisdom, though, because the coolest thing about it is the fact that my editor at the newspaper said I could write some about our transition to Haiti. I haven't done that yet ... still trying to figure out how to make that move. For now, my articles (this is my third) have been observations on matters relating to education.
This month's was about grading student papers and I reprint it here to help fill the gap left by my recent busy-ness:
STUDENT WRITING NEVER CEASES TO ENTERTAIN, OR AMAZE
For this English teacher, the job’s greatest joy and its greatest frustration are one in the same: grading student writing. This paradox resolves itself this way: Grading student writing is frustrating because it takes so much time, but the main reason it takes so much time is because I find it utterly fascinating.
I seem to be incapable of skimming writing assignments. At times I will tell myself, “Let’s save a few minutes by glancing over these paragraphs and giving only a completion grade,” and within sixty seconds I will be deeply engrossed in some student’s description of how spoiled little sisters are or how frustrating math class can be.
I’m sure some readers will doubt me when I say student writing is fascinating. Maybe you recall your own school day compositions, and you know they were mostly a series of mind-numbing generalities strung together to fulfill an assignment with as little effort as possible. Some of that writing crosses my desk too. I didn’t say student writing was 100% fascinating, just that it is interesting to me as a whole.
Sometimes student writing makes me laugh until I have tears streaming down my face. And the unintentional humor is almost always the best kind.
Like the 7th grader who I asked to write a description of the launch of a rocket heading to the moon. The objective was to employ plenty of relevant detail. This young lady wrote of being strapped into the chair and wearing her space helmet and how, as the rocket gained altitude, “my ears popped inside my helmet.” A great detail to include, but her intent was derailed by an egregious spelling error: instead of doubling the P in “popped”, she had doubled the O. I had trouble breathing.
And then there was the 10th grader who wrote a short story entitled “Day with Mom and Grandma!”
“I woke up to the alarm going off, telling me to get up and get ready for my day. It was a Friday morning and I was oh so warm in my bed. Nevertheless, I got up and went downstairs for breakfast. “
She was off to a fairly dull and unoriginal start. But the next sentence grabbed my attention and had me anticipating a rather macabre turn to her tale: “There, cooking over a hot stove, was grandma.”
Unfortunately, it turned out to be nothing more than a preposition problem.
(Even the mistakes students make while writing leave me intrigued by language and communication. Isn’t it curious that in this sentence structure, either “cooking at” or “leaning over” will work just fine, but “cooking over” conjures up a fundamentally different image?)
The other fascinating aspect of student writing, which stretches out grading time, is that it is a window into the student’s mind. This, more than anything else, keeps me engrossed in student writing. It doesn’t take more than a twenty minute journaling exercise to reveal waves of teenage angst, family dysfunction, hopes, future plans, sports, questions about God, and tales of dust-ups with the local police. The act of grading these papers can drag me from heartache to great joy and then back again.
Of course the absolute best part of grading student writing, the aspect that truly rewards the time and effort spent in reading, is the discovery of a diamond in the rough. These are bits of writing so good they beg for a much wider audience.
During a recent journaling exercise, where the topic was open to the students, a handful of my eighth graders spent twenty minutes writing variations of “This assignment is stupid” over and over. Meanwhile, one young man poured out a couple of poems. I only have space here for one and I reprint it with his permission:
“Grassy Plains” by Logan B.
Hindering winds echo
Upon the grassy plain,
No caverns in sight
But hither,
As it wails into your ear.
What it has sought long since faded,
Only a memory is it now.
Anger arises, in the plain,
The wind
Now it bares fangs,
Having lost all hope
As to what it wished to gain.
Tread lightly upon
That desolate grassy plain.
To my way of thinking, reading through stacks of paper is worth it to find a single heartfelt poem written by an 8th grader in under twenty minutes.
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