I do in fact have a grader. For those of you who've never had one, a grader is a graduate student who is paid to grade the work for your class. This is a new concept for me, which explains why I'm grading the papers myself--though I trust the grader to handle the midterm and final exams (which involve short answers, and which I will grade a few of in order to establish a baseline), I haven't gotten to the point (and am not sure I will ever) where I could go for an entire semester without grading any of my students' work.
“Well, I need to see their writing so I can get a sense of who they are,” I replied. I later told my friend Steve that saying this made me feel like some sort of rube. “That's what seminars are for,” one of my interlocutors replied.
Now, it's not my plan here to make either my interlocutors (both of whom I like very much) or the university up the road (which has granted PhDs to some of my favorite people) sound bad, but I imagine that this conversation will astonish most readers of the world's favorite blogzine, if only because I know all five or six of you personally and I know that you've never had graders. It will further astonish you to hear that my interlocutors then asked if my grader was a graduate student, and when I said yes, told me I was lucky, because at their university, graders are often undergraduates or just some guy off the street. (Not necessarily a bad thing, at least in that town; in fact, in attendance at the colloquium that weekend was a guy off the street who seemed like he would have done a very good job grading papers).
This seems, I feel somewhat foolish having to say aloud, like a fairly fundamental abrogation of the contractual transaction presumed by the fact of a university's having students.
That said, can I just say that I hate grading more than almost anything in the whole world, and certainly more than anything I have to do regularly. Yes, it's impossible to know the students without it, and yes, it's impossible if you don't know the students to actually teach them where they are, or to get any real feedback on what they're hearing you say (otherwise you just imagine they're hearing what you would like them to be hearing, an assumption which is wrong in most cases). But still, it's the worst damn thing around, just terribly boring, endless and full of small and irrational angers. It's also occasionally delightful, but as anyone who has held off on grading what they hoped would be a good paper in order to have it as a reward for slogging through some bad ones knows, those occasions, at least when it comes to the nitty gritty of going through a stack of papers, are small consolations at best.
So, to sum up, and to stop here because I need to get back to it so I can finish before class tomorrow (though one student here casually mentioned that it usually takes a month to get things back in their other classes, so my self-imposed deadline of a week need apparently not be met; nonetheless, the superego speaks): 1) Teaching a group of students--even a large group--without grading their work would probably make it impossible to have any sense that they were understanding what you were talking about, and yet apparently some people do it (as do I suppose people who only have multiple-choice tests, who I presume do not analyze response patterns and adjust their teaching accordingly). Teaching should be the product of a recursive relationship, and grading is part of that relationship (though grades themselves may not be). And 2) I hate grading.
by Alain Badiou, Ray Brassier
Point and goal, E Hayot. I share your feeling of tedium, irritation and occasional joy in reading the damn things. But without grading and offering comments, the professor is just an information delivery system, and not a very fast one at that. The conversation about the student's writing is the place where we share some responsibility: the student being responsible to the material, to “giving an account” of it, and the teacher being responsible to the material as well as to the student's handling of it (“giving an account” of both in the writing of comments). It's where that ethical spiral begins where we have to answer to more and more expectations-- i.e. what I think of as the life of the innerlekchul. To have an anonymous professional grader is just about to say that reading isn't very important and can be offloaded, offshored, put out of sight and especially out of mind. So give me my papers even with the grousing.
Ditto, and ditto. The same practice of using “graders” holds true at many universities, including mine, for all the large lecture courses that get discussion sections (or “precepts”). There're too many large lecture courses, if you ask me.
A professor I TA'd for in grad school divvied up the grading evenly among him, me, and the other TA. So each of us got to read 1/3 of the mid-terms, finals, and papers. We met for each assignment to norm the grading and establish clear standards. I thought that was a fair system, and it was definitely a useful part of my development as a teacher.
I don't think lecturing is really teaching. Lecturing is talking. And talking can be done well (be informative, entertaining, thought-provoking, well-paced, and so on) or be really dull and tedious. But it's not teaching, because there's no exchange of ideas between teacher and student, and no shared responsibility as E & H have already said. There's nothing at stake for the student until the student is asked to DO something with the information--apply it, question it, assimilate it in some new way, turn it into something new. It seems to me the reason grading & commenting are so draining and often miserable is because it's so important, because the ethical task of communicating so that the student actually learns to think is harder than it looks from any outside vantage. If you think grading's easy you're not doing it right.
That said, I've got a pile of 10-page papers coming in this weekend, god help me.
After reading this post, I'm wondering why it is that my freshman comp students have so often said that they feel most comfortable in their comp classes. I had assumed it was because I'm six or seven years older than most of them and because the classes are so much smaller than their other gen-eds. I hadn't considered the idea that it may stem from my having read so much of their work; honestly, I wasn't even aware that many humanities profs were using graders. I can't imagine I'd ever know anything about the silent ones if I relied only on in-class discussions.
On a side note, I've also written papers that you graded, and while I found your comments vexing at the time, I'm glad I got them. I still chide myself for overusing “to be,” although this commment would seem to indicate that I still have a long way to go with that. Shucks.
Grading surely does suck, though. And I have more of it to do tonight...
My wife once begged out of a Sunday evening movie with the moms from her playgroup on the grounds that she had 40 papers to grade and a vanishingly small number of hours left.
At least 3 of the moms wrote to say that she “should just let her grader handle it,” and to stop being such an apple-polisher.
Needless to say, the regional comprehensive university where we teach does not have graders! But if locals think we do, then that goes a certain way toward explaining stereotypes about college professors.
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