The Unseen World of Teachers

For a long time, my house has been consumed by student
essays. At first I was the only one bringing them home. On
Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, I pulled out an old red
canvas bag full of books, folders and student papers, and made
stacks on the kitchen table or the living room floor, and started
reading. Often I got them out at 9 or 10 o'clock on weeknights,
too.
The self-imposed arrangement was that I would not let the
students wait longer than one week to get their essays back. By
and large I kept the deadline. Sometimes I beat it, if I had extra
time at the desk in my office.
A few years later, my wife Bonnie started teaching college
composition too, and in between caring for children, we sat in
our chairs reading essays. Mind you, when I say "reading" I do
not mean comfortably soaking in a nice story or a sketchy but
cute idea. I mean an aggressive act of trying to understand what
is going on here (easier sometimes than others), bringing into
mental focus different patterns of strengths, weaknesses and
errors in organization and language, sorting them out, deciding
which ones need attention, and finally, devising a way of talking
about them which is not discouraging. To do this effectively, you
have to know each student, which can be tough going.
At that time I was teaching three or four classes a semester. Each
class had about 22 students, so every assignment I had 60 to 70
essays to "read." A diligent journeyman English teacher takes an
average of about 15-20 minutes to read one essay. You can reach
a point of efficiency where reading and commenting take about
10-12 minutes. For a novice, one essay can take half an hour and
more. That's if you're doing the best you can. It is of course
possible to skim an essay, delete a few stray commas, underline a
couple of subject-verb errors, and scribble a letter grade in five
minutes. And get away with it. It does almost nothing for the
students, though.
So being intent on actually teaching, I had 20-plus hours of
reading ahead of me every time I collected essays.
This went on at our house for years, through bouts with graduate
school and into a small, intense American university in Eastern
Europe, where I became a program chair and Bonnie directed the
writing center, on top of reading essays. Busy, we were. But
here's the punch line: We had no idea what Bonnie was in for.

After we returned from Europe, she got a job teaching high
school English. (I looked into this, too, but learned from the
Maine Department of Education (for a $50 fee) that, although I
held master's and doctoral degrees in English and had taught for
more than 10 years, I still needed seven undergraduate education
courses and a semester of student teaching to be certified to
teach. I declined to pursue it.) In high school, Bonnie had not 60,
but in most years over 100 student writings per assignment. The
Saturday, Sunday and weeknight "reading" about tripled for her.
And the identifying and sorting of problems was even more
complicated because the range of abilities varied so widely.
In her first couple of years, she also spent uncounted hours just
designing courses: mapping out readings, lectures, class
activities, devising assignments that work. And the daily chores
that never diminish: reading and rereading textbooks; revamping
assignments; outlining each day's points; thinking over what to
repeat from yesterday; anticipating confusion. And in high
school, atop these time-consuming activities and truckloads of
administrative paperwork, she had problems that frequently
eclipse all else: how to keep the classroom quiet enough to
accomplish something, and how to deal constructively with the
volcanic emotions of teenagers. Some of her stories will make
your hair stand on end. Maybe the DOE was right to prevent me
from teaching high school, I don't know.
Our house is still consumed by student essays, although they are
all Bonnie's now. After Europe, I taught scaled-down course
loads, went to China as a Fulbright scholar, home-schooled our
son, and later taught online courses, then eventually felt
constrained for various reasons to drop out. Now it's her
Saturdays and Sundays that are occupied with essays. By
February vacation every year, she is physically and emotionally
exhausted, but plugs on.
This is just a sketch of one teaching household, a few lines
really, to suggest some of teaching's components - personal,
professional and cultural. But there's a great deal more to be said,
and the intent is to come back about once a month and try to
clarify what this - education - is all about. Stay tuned.

Dana Wilde, a former English professor, U.S. Fulbright scholar and NEH fellow,
holds a doctorate in English and now works as a news editor and columnist for
the Bangor Daily News. His academic and other writings have appeared widely
in national and international publications.