The Red Pen

by Alissa Wilkinson

If you listened closely at my office door during the month of December, you’d hear a bunch of resounding thuds. It’s the sound of stacks of printed final assignments being dropped onto my desk. In the sorts of classes I teach, the lion’s share of grading comes at the end of the term, and I spend a few solid weeks clutching a red pen in one hand and a mug in the other, trying to give every assignment my attention while also getting my grades in on time.

Grading can be satisfying work. Sometimes you see a long upward arc over a semester. Or you rejoice in a well-crafted sentence from a student who could barely use a comma two years ago. You get to read a story that breaks your heart and then mends it, or a incisive analysis of a cultural trend that is every bit as good as any article you’d read in the Sunday paper. These are the days when you put down the pen with a smile.

But then there are the harsh realities of grading. Standing up in front of a classroom for three hours a week and lecturing passionately about a topic you care about, watching students take notes and answering their questions, can be invigorating. Look at what a difference I’m making, you can think. I’m shifting their paradigm! I’m changing lives! 

Then you grade, and sometimes discover that you’ve done nothing of the sort. Maybe they were listening, but no matter how many times you write it down, they’re still going to put that semicolon in the wrong place or generalize thoughtlessly about “the youth of our culture.” Or they’re going to get a question wrong on an exam that you’ve made a point of reiterating every single week.

In the grand scheme of it all, these barely register as problems, but for any teacher or professor who’s poured their energy and soul into the classroom, they’re a sometimes-painful reminder that we’re probably less awesome than we think we are. Our teaching is effective, but sometimes it falls flat. We can try to shape souls and minds, but ultimately, that work isn’t ours: it’s the work of students’ wills and souls.

So by mid-December or late May, when the stacks of grading are reminding me unrelentingly of my own limited abilities, when I’m sick to death of continuing to talk and grade and circle misplaced colons, it can be tempting to throw up my hands, and so many of us do, and complain about students. They just don’t listen, we say to one another. Or we make snarky jokes about how little they ever change. Thank goodness break is coming, we say. Thank goodness they’re moving on to new classes next semester.

Recently I caught myself starting down this road, but this semester I’d also started teaching Andy Crouch’s book Playing God to one of my classes. In the book, Andy challenges readers to see that their own ability to exercise power comes from the fact that they are made in God’s image: God is a creator, who uses his power in ways that benefit us, and so we can turn around and do the same for others.

He shapes some of us into professors, and we can help in our small ways to turn around and shape students.

Then I thought about whether God ever gets tired of the stack of grading, so to speak, that lands on his desk. If my red pen gets a workout marking semicolons and errant sentences and sloppy arguments over and over and over again, imagine how tired he must get of me, making the same mistakes over and over again, too?

Yet he is remaking me every day. I am becoming new in his hands. I am learning, very slowly, the lessons he’s taught me a thousand times before. They’re lessons he’ll keep trying to teach me my whole life.

I guess if he can do that, I can stick it out with this red pen.

Alissa Wilkinson is Christianity Today’s chief film critic and an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City. She writes CT’s “Watch This Way” blog and tweets @alissamarie.

[Photo by Jenny Kaczorowski, used under a creative commons license, sourced via Flickr.]