20141112.0637

I spent most of yesterday marking papers. There are times I do not know why I do so; few if any of the students read the comments, and fewer yet actually work to correct the problems identified in their work. My efforts on the students' behalf in that regard are therefore frustrating.

Now that I think on it, though, I do have an idea why I work grading as I do. It provides evidence that I can use to defend myself in the event of a grade appeal. It affords me a paper trail I can use to rebut student assertions that the way I have treated their papers is wrong, somehow; it allows me to reassert my authority when it is challenged.

There will be some, of course, who will say that the idea of professorial authority is flawed, that in a student-centered classroom it is the students who have the authority--and that more because of numbers and purportedly democratic ideals than because of any authority that inheres in a position. I doubt that many if any of them change grades on a student's say-so or that they acquiesce to grade appeals without contestation, though. I have never heard of such a thing happening, and I have read much of the theory and reports of its purported application. Because it seems to me that proponents of wholly student-centered, antiauthoritarian teaching would report doing so as a way to enhance their own ethos, the lack is, to my mind, telling.

Others will say that the idea of professorial authority is flawed for other reasons entirely, namely that the professoriate as a whole (but particularly in the academic humanities) is a corps of the fraudulent. We are parasites sucking at the public teat for the most part, either treading over ground already well trodden, finding clues to things that they were never taught where the footsteps of others have destroyed any evidence--or we are wasting our time with modernist trifles and dragging the young along with us as we indoctrinate them into some brainwashed cult of hyper-socialist personality directly and specifically aligned against the "values on which this country was built." (And since quite a bit of that involved genocide and slavery, yes, most scholars of the academic humanities I have known have problems with the "traditional" narrative of US history; genocide and slavery are bad, remember? Ignoring their presence is also bad. Why do people want us to be bad and to endorse badness?) I have to think that many of them did badly in their coursework, and even if they succeeded later on, they still carry the marks awarded them. (I intend the pun.)

Well do I know that old wounds hurt long.

Flawed or not, I do operate in a context that requires me to present an air of authority. As such, I do have to maintain that authority, and so I have to be ready to meet challenges to it. Hence the grading and the work--long and vexing--I do to enact it.