They Would Know

Late last night I realized that I did not post last week. My excuse is that I had a cold and felt sick and delirious the entire week. So, I'm posting now.

I learned from grading that they do not listen to what I have been telling them in class and they do not read the marks I make on their reading responses. If they listened in class, they would know where to put the period after a citation. They would know the difference between book titles and essay titles and how to format them. They would know how to use an introductory comma. They would know that the essay should be four pages long. They would know that the essay was not supposed to be a compare and contrast essay.

If they looked at the marks I made on their reading responses, they would know all of the above. They would know that they should not use contractions. They would know all about comma splices. They would know that I hate the word "very" because it means nothing. They would know that extra spaces between each paragraph are unacceptable ways of trying to fudge the page length.

In writing the same essay, I learned how hard the assignment actually was and how much I did not want to write it. I put if off for days. I whined about it to my husband. He finally took our daughter outside to play in the snow for two hours and said it was my time to write the essay. So, I did. I found myself making connections between my essays that I was not sure were there. I found myself making conclusions and assumptions that I could only sort of support with the text. I wanted to write from memory instead of rereading the essays. I found myself in my students' shoes. This helped me to understand what they had just gone through and to be a little more generous in my grading. Most of all, I felt empathy. I think this is important for any relationship.