November 8, 2010
Another quiet, uneventful day.
My favourite kind.
Kids in school, Stephen at the university, me at home with a nice, hot cup of tea, a Reilley sitting on my arms to prevent working, and a stack of 50 intro papers about discrimination based on sex and gender, as it occurs in the criminal justice system.
Oh.
Happy.
Day.
I hate marking.
Deplore it.
Abhor making decisions about the "value" of one paper compared to the value of another.
The A papers are easy.
The F papers are easy.
Its the in-between ones.
The B's.
What is the difference between a B+ and B?
Really challenging are those in the C range.
Which is where most of the papers will land.
Whether the students feel the same way or not.
I have a policy.
A 48 hour policy.
Don't even think, contemplate, ponder, assume, consider, envisage, suppose that it is in your best interest to approach me about your grade before 48 hours has passed between the time you get the paper and the time you consider that maybe now, possibly, is the time to approach me about your grade.
And if the 48 hours happens to end on a weekend, well then, you're just gonna have to wait until Monday.
Ten years of teaching has taught me that students are emotional after they get a paper back.
And research indicates they even have a variety of strategies to either hide or share their grade.
Students, I have learned, don't always necessarily understand the gap between what they think they should get. . .
. . .and what their work suggests that they should get.
And this is a big gap.
Like, Grand Canyon.
No matter how long or how many comments I labour over, how much of the paper I cover in red or purple or green ink, the spelling and grammar corrections I point out, the hours I spend marking, there are those students who believe, feel, have convinced themselves that they deserve a better grade.
These students were the impetus behind the 48 hour policy.
The catalyst, as it were.
One time having an angry, disgruntled, annoyed, bellyaching, crabby, petulant, sulky student charge AT you, violently waving their paper at you, proclaiming loudly that YOU will be THE reason for THEIR not getting into graduate school, leaving them no choice but to sell pencils on Younge Street is too many times.
So, to avoid students from saying things they don't mean. . .
. . .and to prevent me from saying this I probably would mean. . .
I established the 48 hour rule.
Safety first!
There's and mine.
As a student, I can remember the anxiety, fear, concern I would experience when anticipating the return of a paper or exam.
Not so much if I knew I had done well.
High school English.
Canadian Literature.
Modern Novel.
Irish Literature.
I knew I'd do well.
Math.
Science.
Biology.
Political Science.
French.
Not so much.
During those times, I could wear a case of Secret Anti-Perspirant, coupled with two maxi pads under each arm and I would still sweat buckets wondering if whether or not I'd just passed or barely failed.
Math was excrutiatingly difficult for me.
I can remember as far back as grade two how hard I struggled with math.
Greater or less than.
I was in my thirties before I realized the less than sign was shaped like this: <.
Sort of like an L.
I would randomly put < or > in the yellow colored circle.
Make designs.
Patterns.
I figured I had a 50/50 chance of being right.
By the time I finished grade six I had convinced my elementary school teachers that I understood math.
Or at least that's what they let me think.
Junior High was a completely different story.
I had the worst grade seven math teacher to ever receive a B.Ed.
Rather than teach math, she was more interested in sharing fashion ideas.
She was actually my first encounter with stilettos.
Everyday, she would come in teetering and tottering on the tinest pair of high heels.
In retrospect, I think that she was a poor math teacher because she had to use all her energy and skill to keep herself from falling over.
And substitutes.
I hated substitutes.
As soon as they started checking attendance, I'd begin to fidget.
Perspire.
Swelter.
My heart would race.
Hands shaking.
How come?
My name.
DawnE ClarkE.
For some reason I have yet to be able to figure out, if you put an E at the end of something, no one knows how to pronounce it.
So in addition to being overweight and bright in some subjects, I'd have to suffer through the indignity, and the chuckles of my classmates as the substitute would inquire:
Dwayne Clerk.
So, no good at math, hating every minute I had to sit through slopes, quadratic equations, algebra.
I could live with that.
Until I would walk into my math class and see behind the desk the substitute of all detrimental, deletirious, vicious, vile, wicked substitutes.
We'll call her Mrs. Many.
And Mrs. Many was retired.
Very retired. Very old school.
Where my grade seven math teacher, Mrs. Pylon would teach us everything but math and treated most of us with indifference (unless you were the same size as her sister, which meant you could try on clothes to see if they would fit her). . .
Mrs. Many would drill, beat, hammer, pound, scare frighten, terrorize, intimidate math into you.
Especially if you were not arithmatically accomplished.
When Mrs. Many was manning the desk, I knew math class was going to be akin to having the Titanic captained by Attila the Hun.
One day I tried sitting in the front, thinking if I was up front, she would ignore me.
Didn't work.
And Mrs. Many was well endowed.
Like many well endowed women of her generation, Mrs. Many wore a bra that was the span of my hands on the size, straps the width of napkins, cups shaped like missles and everything reinforced, with steel, I think.
As it happened, she happened to ask me a question.
Leaning in while she asked it.
And two buttons of her striped blouse were gaping.
Open.
Wide.
Yawning.
At eye level.
Revealing the level of reinforcements required to keep her all in.
I laughed.
I couldn't help it.
What happened next I don't remember.
Except the beady eyes of Mrs. Many boring into my wide, oh-shit-I-probably-shouldn't-have-done-that-deer-in-headlights-look.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, trying to shake the memory of those eyes, which occasionally haunt me in my dreams.
Or nightmares.
Usually brought on from marking.
Let the circle be unbroken.
Title Lyric: The Math by Hilary Duff.
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