Of Grading and Guilt
Of Grading and Guilt
by
Ruth Jörgensen Smock
Montgomery Junior College, as it was called before its A.A.U.P. chapter and others prevailed in getting the “Junior” removed, had its first campus in Takoma Park, Maryland. And it was there that, in the spring term of 1956, I began my teaching career.
My first impression of MJC was that it had to be the best smelling campus in the area, standing as it does near Giant Food Store’s Heidi bakery. My second impression was the coziness of faculty meetings when some thirty souls of us full-time members met in the anteroom in Dean Deyo’s office; today single departments have as many members. For example, just one person, whom the Dean considered a “luxury,” taught both French and German, a seemingly cushy job with few students and fewer classes than the rest of us had; today French and German are separate departments entirely.
Montgomery College was my first teaching assignment. It became available just after I had seen the film The Blackboard Jungle, so I approached it with apprehension. In order, therefore, to get an insight into the possible criminal psyches of my students, I required all of them on the first day of class to write essays entitled, “What Makes Me Angry.” And I went home that weekend with over 100 essays to correct. That taught me my first lesson: never—but never—collect themes from all classes at the same time.
It turned out that their anger stemmed from normal teenage stresses, like having to write an essay on the first day of English class, but I found not an indication of criminality in the lot. Fittingly, on the following Monday I discovered that our blackboards were not black but green.
A comic strip of the time was posted on the door of one of the faculty. It showed an English teacher beginning her correcting chore with a dour look. The second frame showed her smiling, the third laughing, the fourth rolling on the floor in hysterical glee, and the fifth handing the theme back to the student with a fat “F” on it. I found that correcting themes was like that. One student wrote, “English words have many inflictions.” Another, “One of China’s religions is Confusion.” Sometimes “Confusion” seemed to dominate the classroom. I was informed that “in 1066 the Angles were conquered by the Norms,” that “the levels of language are formal, informal, British and U.S.,” and that “‘appositive’ is the opposite of ‘negative.’” I sometimes wondered whether I was keeping the students awake or just up.
Occasionally, a scholarly type ventured to apply logic to his reading. For example, one young man, in his oral report on the Odyssey, noted that Telemachus regularly greeted the goddess Athena by “touching her filet.” “‘Filet’ means boneless,” he reasoned. Then, shrugging his shoulders, he added, “I guess that means he touched her where she had no bones.”
By the final days of a term, the pieces somehow seemed to fall into place. After painstakingly composing my first set of examinations, I assumed that I would always use the same set. However, as time was to prove, I never used exactly the same exam twice.
But then I had to grade the students.
Grading became my nemesis. Never one to like being judged, I disliked even more judging others. Yet it had to be done. So I did it with the result that I regularly felt guilty when I knew that a student had done his utmost and deserved A for effort, yet was not adept at handling language and finished with a C or worse. All was not in vain, however, for I still hear from promising students of yore who have become successful in their professions.
In addition to College students, I heard from an occasional prisoner who had seen my name on a writing somewhere and wished my help in getting his “story” published. The letters were substantive and merited acknowledging, but I never answered one. I was tempted, though, just for the treat of teaching without the accompanying guilt of grading. Besides, a story entitled “How I Escaped from Alcatraz” ought to become a swim-away best seller. But such a proposal followed by “I am to be released in the near future and would like to hear from you” puts one on guard.
The colorful moments were not confined to the mail. Time went by, as is its bad habit, and the College, with its open door policy, took in more and more foreign students. One of my class lists, in fact, included the following family names: Chien, Dengovitkig, Ngo, Ortiz, Sawyer, Son, Van Dyck, Vu, and Yang. (I don’t know how the American “Sawyer” got in there, but he didn’t stay.) None of the foreign nationals had the basic knowledge of English that college attendance assumes, and teaching such a varied lot was as frustrating as it was fascinating. For openers, I asked them to write in their native languages their reasons for coming to the United States. On scanning the results, I not only could not understand those written in Roman script, but I found several in undecipherable scripts, Chinese, Arabic and Devanagari. Good Lord, I thought: an American with a whole bouquet of doctor’s degrees would still be totally illiterate in most of the world. It was a humbling revelation.
These non-Americans were earnest and industrious, a delight to know. Since pronunciation, especially accent, was a main stumbling block to their verbal communication, I had each one read a few sentences from a text, then drilled them on mispronounced words. Those who had worked with Americans overseas logically did better than others. One Chinese, whose family had escaped to Japan and who spoke both Asian languages fluently, got stuck one day on a polysyllabic term. Sweat beaded on his brow as he struggled with the phonics. The class waited patiently, but just as he was about to speak, a diminutive Vietnamese girl pronounced the word aloud. With unconcealed contempt, the Chinese youth looked at her and blurted, “Big mouse.”
The problem of grading was then more stressful than ever. How could I with any academic integrity give college credit for their studying a language that should be a tool before they even entered college? Yet how could I humiliate these, my most genuine scholars, by failing them? The dilemma occupied my mind for all of the spring term of 1977.
The solution turned out to be simplicity itself. It was supplied by Kingman Brewster, president emeritus of Yale, who, in a speech, told the following story about Descartes, the cogito, ergo sum philosopher:
When asked by his hostess at an afternoon social whether he would take another cup of tea, Descartes replied, “I think not.” And he thereupon disappeared.
That’s it, I thought. I, too, can disappear. So I solved the problem of sitting on the hot seat of judgment by opting for early retirement. And soon thereafter, I faded westward with the setting sun to experiment with a new life-style in Oregon.
Takoma Park Campus: Department of English, 1956–1977; Professor Emerita.