My life since late January has been devoted to grading
essays. I have graded about 120 up to this point in the semester. I got about
forty more essays earlier this week, and if no one withdraws from my course
before the withdrawal deadline and if the students enrolled remain active, I
can expect to grade about 200 essays this semester. My current teaching
schedule, nonetheless, is lighter than it used to be. One difference now is my spending more time in bed. I used to survive on four or five hours of sleep a night but can no longer sustain that schedule in my middle 60's.
I am not sure how many essays I have graded in my thirty-two
years of teaching. If every section of English that I taught required that I
grade 100 essays, and since I have taught, approximately, 219 sections of
English in my lifetime, I have graded about 21,900 essays. Some semesters I
taught a section of creative writing, so my figures are only rough estimates. A
more accurate figure may be less than 19,000 essays because some sections also had
less than twenty-five students. Even so, I have spent a lot of time grading
essays late into the night.
