Does every teacher have a love-hate relationship with grading essays? I certainly do. Maybe it's my attention to detail that mires me in the minutiae of commas and appositives and dangling prepositions; before I realize it, an hour has passed, and I've graded exactly one essay. More likely, however, it is the actual overall writing that forces me to read a sentence or paragraph (or, unfortunately sometimes the entire essay) multiple times before vaguely understanding the meaning that is trying to be conveyed. Now, I am not blaming my students; I'm their teacher, and I'm teaching them how to write. So, the giant sighs that can be heard from my apartment while I'm grading essays are not only because I'm thinking, "This makes absolutely no sense" but also, "How could I have failed my students this much?" (Those sighs may also indicate that I have run out of chocolate in the midst of grading 250 essays. That is when you want to knock on the door, drop chocolate, and quickly run away.)
Even though grading essays is a terrible time for me, I absolutely adore my students here, especially those that I've had in class since February. They know me well enough to show up to class not too too late (ah, Malawian time!) and to be able to joke around with me. Today, for example, one of the students got up to leave class without saying anything. I looked puzzled as I watched him hurriedly jog down the steps leaving the classroom. Then, because he was half-running, he completely wiped out on the cement landing at the bottom of the steps. (He also immediately bounced back up and ran off). Because I was at the front of the class, I was the only one to see this, although the entire class heard it. And I started laughing. A lot. And so did my students. Once I stopped laughing, I asked them, "Am I a bad person because I just laughed at that?" "YES!" they all responded. See, lots of love in my classroom.
My newer students (since August) don't know me well enough to tell me I'm a bad person. And they don't know what a hard grader I am. If they did, they might not have produced essays that included the following very questionable sentences. They had to write argumentative essays answering the question: Should tobacco companies be held responsible for tobacco-related illnesses and deaths? Here are some of their sentences [with my added commentary because I couldn't help myself, and you'll soon understand why]:
In these activities you find tobacco cigars or powders is being painted white before people who are ignorant or aware for its harm on peoples' health.
[Are you sure you aren't taking any white powder while writing your essay?]
Tobacco smoking is husardace to human health.
[Husardace, pronounced 'hew-sard-ace': a person skilled at cutting up sardines; being skilled at chopping in general.] [Much better than that trite word 'hazardous,' don't you think?]
Smoking is done in two ways that's smoke smoking, smokeless smoking, and passive smoking.
[Dude, I've heard that smoke smoking is like so totally better than smokeless smoking.] [And wasn't that three ways?][Treaties and cigarettes. Cigarettes and treaties. Some things were just meant to go together.]
It states that this crop [tobacco] is majory used for the production of arms especially bullets. We are told that tobacco is a raw material for the poison in the bullet.
[Ummmm....]
Such an argument can also be related to the current fashionable HIV and AIDS.
[Right, because we all want that fashionable new disease, don't we? I mean, the two Ashleys have it, so now everyone has to get it.]
...there will be more, I'm sure.
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