There’s a lot of repetition in human life, and certainly in teaching. Sometimes this is a good thing. You teach the Odyssey every year and you like it more every time. You grade forty essays about it and you begin to feel something else.
Writing is a complex task, and a piece of writing is improved, like anything complex, by fixing one problem at a time. A given boy may have two or three major errors to choose from, and perhaps ten minor ones. Each time he reviews an outline or a draft, he can generally tackle one of the big ones, or a few of the smaller sort. Time being finite and attention costly, some errors will remain.
Teaching a class about these errors in advance will reduce their frequency, but (less than helpfully) it increases the frustration of seeing them in submitted work. One feels ignored when a boy makes a mistake he has just been warned about, even though he has probably missed it while dutifully catching several others.
Then there is the fact that an error made by half of the boys in the class becomes, after the tenth time you correct it, more irritating than a truly inventive mistake, which has at least the charm of novelty. But should a boy who makes a common error suffer for being tenth in the stack? It is as if he had come home and left his shoes on the stairs, ten minutes after his mother tripped over his brother’s shoes in the same spot.
The only effective way I have found to guard against this sort of frustration is to spend a few minutes before I grade actually picturing my boys fixing their errors and missing a few of them in the process. I return to that thought when I find, for the eleventh time, a vague conclusion beginning with “This shows.”
The best grading holds back, marking only a few well-chosen and connected problems. It is actually easier to mark everything, but that is as helpful as telling a lousy batter that his whole swing is a disaster. One thing at a time.
Eventually, the boys do learn. Well, most of them learn. Then they are all suddenly taken off my hands.
The thing about parenting is that the kids grow up. The thing about teaching is that they don’t, or rather, they are replaced as they begin to.
The job of the shepherd is to love with repetitive care. The sheep keep straying off. You keep bringing them back to the grass they wouldn’t eat yesterday. They keep walking into the thorns. You keep looking for cuts and binding them up. The more repetition you get, I suppose, the more perfect your care becomes—or else the more routine and careless.
I have a large bottle of red ink, which I have nearly emptied. Long ago I bought it for the name of the color, which is “Matador.” The matador slays the bull. So too the English teacher.
But I am coming to realize, after many years of marking essays, that I am the bull. That the boys are the matadors, that the red I spill while grading is my own, that their vague antecedents or comma splices or illegible conclusions are capes waving me into the arena. The trick is not to see red and charge. It is to know that, although I am the heavier and stronger animal, my job is not to win.