20130922.1908

On this autumnal equinox, the weather in Stillwater, Oklahoma, has decided to reflect the new season.  It was warm, yes, but not hot--not by a wide margin--and the morning was pleasantly cool, indeed.

I did not get to enjoy as much of it as I perhaps ought to have done.  Instead, I spent a fair bit of the day grading, which is far and away the worst part of teaching--and in some senses not really part of it.  Grading is simply the assessment of student performance; student performance is not quite so connected to the in/ability of the teacher as many would like to pretend.  I--and many others--had bad teachers who never issued a low grade, and I--and many others--had and have excellent teachers who never offer formal evaluation, never issue a grade.

While I do not like grading per se, I do enjoy the opportunity to read some of what my students write.  From time to time, amid the vague responses (something like "It was just so great a thing that I saw once"), worn clichés ("Needless to say"), attempts to "sound smart" ("The acquisition of literacy denotes a hallmark of my prepubescent interactions with institutionalized educational programmatic structures"), and...strange...ideas, things stand out that are well worth attention.  Sometimes, they are simply funny statements, made so by their abruptness and deviation from expectation; one student opened with a comment about eating donuts.  Sometimes, they are thought-provoking, and in a way that the student may well have intended rather than of such thoughts as "What was this person thinking?"

Things would be better were the option available to simply read and respond, rather than having to read and critique.  Then again, given how rarely students read the corrective comments that they know others will make, how much use they would get from the critique is uncertain...