Oh student writing

Thou which art so annoying.

In theory, I’m meant to be objective when I’m marking students’ writing. I do try to be as objective as possible by not letting student A’s odious tickdom blind me to the merits of their drivel. I try to give all of them advice which will lead to their improvement even although I have no vested interest in any of them doing well and succeeding.

I have a colleague who admits that she has to stop marking writing because the cretinous nonsense which she sees infuriates her so much that if she doesn’t stop, she’ll go apoplectic.

I know how she feels. This afternoon I persisted in finishing off some writing so that it wouldn’t be hanging over my head this weekend. I really wanted to go home, but I waded my way through the lack of a decent opening sentences, an absence of evidence, and want of appointment decorum to get these gems out of the way.

Perhaps my expectations are misleading me. One of the two Pre-AL classes is quite good, and the other, as I’ve said in previous posts, is crippled by an excess of dribbling idiots. But both classes made the same sort of errors in their writing this week.

I do have a suspicion that they all fled to the Chinese Internet for answers to the first piece of writing, but for this one, because the Boys in Beijing were having their meeting and the Internet was being treated like <insert wholly inappropriate image here>, they had to resort to their wits, and their wits let them down. Even some of the best students proved less competent on this occasion than their original oeuvres suggested.

I was thinking last night about the relationship between impressions and marking writing. I’m sure that I’m more well disposed to neat handwriting than I am to the horrible spider writing which strays between the lines on the page, crosses them, but seldom alights on the line for a prolonged period.