Teaching and Grading in the University
“Though I enjoyed both lecturing and discussion, reading student papers was another matter. It is the grimmest part of a teacher’s life. He can’t avoid it, or at least he shouldn’t, for writing is an essential part of learning to think or speak with precision. It is becoming a lost art among students, some of whom apparently graduate from high school without ever having written an essay in their lives.
The teacher must make his students write, and so far as practicable, he must read their writing himself. So he must be prepared to be a martyr. It isn’t the A papers that give him trouble; some of them he can even enjoy. Nor is it the papers that fall flat on their faces with carelessness; he can deal out a swift F and pass on. What he falls asleep over and must read again are the C+ productions, churned out by able students for credit only, written with obvious boredom and read with an intenser boredom.”
(Brand Blanshard, For One Who Is Liberally Educated, Life Is Far Too Short)
Blanshard speaks from experience, and via experience, I concur. Reading and grading papers are among the least desirable aspects of university teaching. Too many students submit C+ work motivated, it seems, only by the hope of obtaining minimal credit. Too many are inexperienced and imprecise writers. And too few are sufficiently interested in the subject matter.
Inexperience is no mark against the one who seeks to remove it yet lacks opportunity. But such lack should not be the case with university students: they ought to have had plenty of chances to write in high school; if secondary education were what it should be, they would have had these tests of intellectual character. However, just as is does not entail ought, the reverse does not hold. That high school should reliably produce experienced college writers does not entail such a state of affairs. The university instructor thus puts up with papers that freqently fall short of higher educational writing standards. This longsuffering involves a kind of martyrdom, as Blanshard notes.
For the instructor, the cultivation of patience is a silver lining in this otherwise lamentable situation of remedial education. And some students also have the opportunity develop patience: the more advanced ones who are ready to take on university-level work are forced to bear with the delays imposed on the class by the students who didn’t develop the requisite skills in high school.
*Update (9/23/23): I was reading through a recent student evaluation report for one of the moral philosophy classes I teach. One student expressed a degree of impatience that he had to endure other students who needed to have certain philosophical points — which he understood the first time they were covered in class — repeated because they were unable to understand them the first time. He then qualified his comment by saying that he understands that students learn at different rates and that some need multiple repetitions, but in his case, he was eager to progress to new lessons rather than repeat old ones.