The Angel of Truth and Decency
I have no interest in grading people. It is an ugly position to be in. No one likes to be judged, yet because I am a teacher I am required to do so, while extending the problem of grading by using the ethereal notion of quantification. This said, the grades given out at the university I was teaching at were almost always not equal to the actual grades the students should have received, but because grade inflation was such a rampant business, and because the customers, or students, shared power with the administration, at some point previous to me things had assumed a fakery which I would soon be forced to oppose or to acquiesce to—that is, if I cared to keep my superiors off my back, who were getting students and/or their pompous parents on their backs, or the threat of such actions. This was implicit in my case—I received no complaints from parents—but there was evidence of just such things occurring with other colleagues, or there were stories about such things occurring.
Some of the grading problem was exacerbated by the high tuition at the school. There was an underlying but pervasive belief that because the parents were forking over so much money to have their children educated, and to position them for prestigious jobs after college, their grades were not only to be questioned, but also changed based on as much unjustified outrage as the parent/s could manage. There was the sense that the grades would be purchased, and that the teachers, especially adjunct instructors and teaching assistants, were merely clerks who could be manipulated and abused at will.
As one of my colleagues rationally put it, "These kids have never been told 'No' in their lives."
*
The class tension, the sense of entitlement of some of the students, and the grade inflation I didn't know about in the beginning added up to some strange experiences. I graded one student's paper a C, and marked on the page where the necessary improvements needed to be. He came up to me after class, and said, "I believe you made a mistake on my paper. I don't get Cs." I told him if he'd like to set up an appointment with me, we could go over his paper in more detail. He agreed to this but was visibly irritated.
When the day came for our appointment in my office, he walked in and acted as if the whole experience was beneath him. He sat in a chair next to my desk, at an angle from where I was sitting. He was about three feet away. He began to argue with what I was saying almost immediately. As well, and as was typical with many of the students, he decided he was the one in charge, and told me to explain my reasoning for his grade. He sat back and listened, as if I was saying, "Please understand."
I explained the paper as I saw it, and he soon began to see where he was not writing coherently, and had misunderstood the assignment. But he was furious. He began literally pounding with his fist on my desk, in rapid succession, to the point where some papers flew off my desk. I looked at him with amazement. His face was reddened, and his eyes fierce. I didn't have enough experience at this time, and was afraid of the repercussions, so I didn't tell him to get the hell out of my office. I tried to calm him down, and told him he could rewrite it, based on the suggestions I had given him. Begrudgingly, he accepted.
*
I was sitting in my office one afternoon, and I began to hear a male, much like the one above, verbally accosting a female colleague (I'll call her Wilma), who had an office next door. They were out in the hallway. Wilma was trying to explain to the student that because he hadn't actually written anything in order to get a grade, there wasn't a chance that he could get an A, a grade he thought he deserved. He was taking advantage of her, as she was a bit meek and non-confrontational, which she would admit to.
I wasn't going to do anything at first, because it seemed like it would end soon. But the student persisted, in any case, and the situation didn't seem to be ending. I didn't want to interfere, because I didn't want it to look like the situation "needed a man to handle it." That was not the impression I wanted to leave. I wanted, mainly, for the student to stop his unchecked abuse of my colleague. It was also common in conversations I had with a few female colleagues to hear their difficulties with male students, who tested their authority at many turns. I could understand this, as I experienced the same thing, or the beginnings of such mutiny.
At some point, I got tired of it, as I was trying to grade papers, and the student was not leaving. He was holding on to an unreasonable, unending, and preposterous position, while acting as if my colleague was the one who was obstructing him. I was annoyed by the disruption and him.
I got up from my desk, and walked out into the hallway, where the male student and Wilma were. I gave him a furrowed, intense stare, and he looked at me strangely. I continued doing this, standing and staring, until he began to get quieter, and then, in an awkward shuffle, left with a friend who was hanging around in the background.
As the student left, Wilma turned to me. I figured she was about to thank me, for getting the student out of her hair.
Instead, she said, "My god, you were scaring me. What's with that stare? You could get a building to move with that thing."
*
Wilma and I would soon begin an infrequent intimacy. Unfortunately, this intimacy began during the most frazzled period of my life, during which I was teaching rhetoric, and scaring myself endlessly with odd thoughts about my sanity and the ever-present refrain of taking my life.
She was a reserved, quirky woman, who seemed to enjoy pop culture, and was adept at satirizing it. In one story she talked about people in a mall. She filled it with first-hand knowledge as a sales clerk, and the knowledge she had gained from reading books on the mythology of malls, the statements they made by their architectures, their spaces, the philosophy of the society through their existences, and so on. I always enjoyed Roland Barthes' Mythologies, which moved toward seriocomic explanations of such things, like the world of wrestling and the art of striptease, so her pursuit of popular culture through this lens interested me. She also wrote about the folding techniques of certain clothing stores at which she had been employed. One night, she showed me an inter-office document with illustrations of each stage in the folding procedure. There were white lines feigning perforation that were meant to indicate the next fold. It proceeded like this through eight or nine stages, until one had properly folded clothing.
During the viewing of this document, she explained that another store she was at had a different folding policy, and that this caused her to be confused at times about which policy she was to follow. I believe she told me she was corrected when she folded incorrectly.
*
One day, her office-mate (and someone I knew) came next door to my office, to explain to me the proper usage of some tricky grammar problem I didn't know the answer to. He was well-known to be the grammar expert, and so I had sought him out.
When he finished writing and explaining on the little chalkboard in my office, I said I appreciated his help.
I had a stack of papers that I had graded and was still working on, on my desk. I showed him another confusing sentence in the student's paper, and told him that I knew something was wrong with it, but I couldn't explain what it was, what was missing. He explained immediately that in this case this and that needed to be this and those, or something else that seemed arcane.
He then turned the page, and looked seriously around the page. He turned another page, and another, until he was to the end of the paper. Then he began to laugh. I was nervous as to what he was laughing at, because I felt so unsure of myself generally, and particularly in grammar usage.
He asked me, "How long did this six-page paper take you to grade?"
"About an hour," I said. "Maybe a little more."
He laughed again, in disbelief, and said, "James, you've corrected and made comments on nearly every word and line in the paper!"
I didn't know what to say to him, but it was clear that he found it ridiculous. Continuing, he said, "You shouldn't do that. The student is going to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of problems and errors you've highlighted. Plus, you only talk about the mistakes on the page. In red ink, to boot! Just isolate a few recurring problems and have the students understand them. But also say positive things about the paper. If all they see are errors, they'll be pretty dispirited. You have to prop them up as well. Do you see what kind of message you're sending with all this red ink?"
I didn't, really. I thought I was being earnest and helpful. But I realized he had a point. I didn't give him the satisfaction of knowing this, though. I just told him, "I'll think about it."
At the time, I believe a part of me thought he was a participant in the problem I was having with the grading situation with students. I felt he, along with many, many others, were being too soft with the students, coddling them. I graded as I had been graded—by stern nuns—which meant a C was average work, a B was above average, and an A meant excellence.
When I was graded, simply turning in the paper was not tantamount to starting at a C. Turning in the paper was simply what one did—one didn't get points for doing it. It seemed like this was not the situation at the university at which I was teaching. I would hear, "But I turned it in," as the prologue to a grading discussion I'd have with students.
The grade inflation of others hampered me, because the students were not used to getting the lower grades I was giving. Other teachers would inflate the grades for various reasons—namely, though, it seemed to me, the next higher grade was given to keep students off their backs, to avoid the highly charged atmosphere of talking about grades. Or to be nice. One can never underestimate the need to "make nice." Or the teachers had been graded similarly wherever they had gone to school and saw no inflation at all.
I don't want to come off as an angel of Truth and Decency here, because I thought grades were pretty nebulous assignments on the whole. I only cared to have the students not bothering me about the grades I would give out, and not having to explain the magical potion of the grade itself. One seemingly had to keep a straight face when discussing the mechanized process of distilling imaginative writing into a number, which equaled a grade. I believe a teacher either slowly and perhaps unknowingly acquiesces at this point by inflating the grade, or remains resolute and puts up with the stress of what fair grading may bring.
*
Wilma also collected Pez-dispensers. She had over 200 of them lining the upper walls of her apartment. She also had an obscure catalog from Germany, detailing the hardest-to-find dispensers. I can no longer remember what these were, but for some reason I think there was a John Kennedy (the prez) dispenser. This may be just some bit of fantasy I've come up with, though it does persist.
We would spend time talking about various underworlds, such as the Pez universe, or exercise videos (she was an avid participant), or the strange phenomenon of the high number of women in the creative writing program seemingly addicted to Diet Coke. This is to say, our discussions weren't always about the invisible mythologies underlying capitalism's phony realism. Sometimes they were catty and topical. Either way, it was usually humorous.
I can't explain the boundaries of our relationship, because it didn't seem to have any. We were not a couple, though we were intimate at stretched-out intervals. I didn't pay it much attention, as I believe she didn't either. I enjoyed our time together but I just never thought of it beyond that, because of how much time would pass between encounters.
*
When the spring semester ended in 1998, I made a decision to get sober. I quit drinking on May 19th. For the next four months, I was battling the physical and mental addiction to alcohol. I would think about having a drink about every five minutes during this time. I am erring on the conservative side—at times it was multiple drinking wishes within a minute. I would continually have to talk myself out of it. It was relentless. It was like someone was constantly whispering to me, "C'mon, let's go get a drink." A friend of mine had once said she wished she could just remove her head sometimes, and place it on a table, and then come back to it, put it back on, when she was ready for it again. I thought of her saying this a lot during this time. I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, and obsess about alcohol for the next hour. No one would be selling alcohol at that time, but I would think up elaborate scenarios of possible ways of getting some anyway. A few times during these three a.m. obsession-fests, I'd start crying spontaneously, for reasons I still cannot comprehend.
I didn't partake of Alcoholics Anonymous, because the god-talk, sanctimony, and my arrogance didn't mix well. Looking back, I think it would probably have helped me to have a respite from the whispering in my head. Also, I grew up in a place where one kept silent about such things, where one was to suffer alone, and definitely not bother anyone with such things. So while I was going through all the mental flailings, I felt deeply embarrassed by my troubles, and a weakling because of it as well.
*
When school began again in the fall, I avoided speaking with Wilma, because I believe I came to suspect that she wanted a full-time relationship. Avoidance was not the way to handle it, but it's the only way I did things then, confrontation being much too uncomfortable for me.
Consequently, it would seem, she wrote a story which featured a secondary protagonist in a tug-of-war circuit, which consisted of travelling teams of competitive rope-pullers. The secondary protagonist was one of the rope-pullers. He was not being intimate with the protagonist, as he was so consumed with the tug-of-war circuit. His mind was elsewhere. She read this story at the annual graduate student reading series. It was funny, and people laughed. I walked up to her afterward, and told her I liked the story, that it was really well done. She looked at me with a hint of anger, yet regrouped with a thin smile, and said, "Thanks."
Some months later, when we began speaking again, though still tensely, she revealed that she was upset that I had said the complimentary things I had said, because she had intended the secondary protagonist to be a satirical portrait of me. She said she wanted to sting me with the portrait. So when I complimented the story, she felt that she hadn't affected me in the least, which upset her. I was not playing games with her; I simply didn't see myself in the character.
We graduated in 1999, and I didn't hear from her again.
About one month ago in this year, 2003, I was in a bookstore, and looking through all those Best of anthologies, when I spotted one announcing the best upand- coming fiction writers, which featured stories from a mere fifteen people from all over the country.
Wilma was one of them.
I saw the title of her story, didn't recognize it, and began reading it in the store. Somewhere on the second page, I realized what it was. The story selected by the esteemed editor was the very one in which I was depicted as a competitive ropepuller.
I had never read it before.
I didn't remember most of the story, but the thought of being depicted in this way, during the most mentally and physically screwed-up time of my life, annoyed me, and seemed especially cruel because of it. There was the sense to it of not only kicking a man when he's down, but laughing at him to boot, because he keeps falling down because of himself. And then to be presented as an asexual buffoon, solely interested in rubbing his hands on cinderblocks to roughen them up for rope-pulling, to act as the oafish catalyst for her comedy, to act as her literary puppet, in short—this got me even more annoyed. But the topper, the topper was the fact that this story was now in bookstores across the country, and available to everybody I didn't know.
I bought the anthology and gave it to my girlfriend to read. I sat across the room from her, waiting for her shock and outrage to rise. She continued reading. I was getting restless.
I said to her, "Well?"
She looked up, innocently, embarrassed, confused, and said, "I don't see you in this at all. Where are you?"
"I'm everywhere!" I said, exasperated.
She looked at the story again, briefly, then looked up, then back to the book, and shrugged her shoulders.
Then she said, "I don't know, I don't see it. Don't you think you're being a little bit egotistical?"
"Me?" I asked. "In any case, she's the one driving me to it."
"No, she's not," she said. "You are. You're doing all the driving."
I let that sink in.
She continued, "And, anyway, what's wrong with her writing it? You did have a relationship. It was her relationship, too. Not just yours. She has every right to say what she wants to."
I let that sink in as well.
Unabated, she continued, "And, anyway, you're writing about people in those stories you're writing, right now. You'll probably end up writing one about her. You'll end up judging her, sideways, as well. How is hers any different from what you're doing?"
"Because," I said, glumly, "I think hers is the truth."