Grading Papers Is Hell (But It Doesn’t Have To Be)
by Talia Argondezzi
There’s a certain beautiful, irksome symmetry about writing assignments. Whatever carelessness, vagueness, or still-inchoate pedagogical goals creep into a teacher’s assignment tend to return to her in the form of careless, vague, and poorly executed student essays.
Instructors are skilled at finding scapegoats for our students’ awful writing — the failing public school system, our university’s shoddy or spotty composition program, our students’ individual apathy or laziness — but ultimately a lot of what makes student essays bad, what makes them such torture to read, is faulty assignment design.
Back when computers had black screens with pixilated green block letters and demanded a lot of command-writing know-how, IT geeks called a similar phenomenon “GIGO,” for Garbage In, Garbage Out; that is, if you tell your computer to do dumb stuff, the computer acts dumb. An imprecise understanding of Eastern religious traditions nudges me to liken this to karma. For our purposes, let’s call this trend the assignment boomerang.
Dante Alighieri would call it divine retribution for professorial sins. I got smacked hard with the assignment boomerang a few years ago, the first time I taught Dante’s Inferno, a department-mandated text in City College’s World Humanities General Education requirement. For those not familiar with the epic, the protagonist — also named Dante — travels through the Catholic hell and describes, in Italian terza rima, the pain and anguish experienced by the many sinners he sees there. The sins grow progressively more serious, and the punishments correspondingly more gruesome, as Dante descends circle by circle down the cone-shaped hole of hell, until he reaches Satan in the ninth and final circle, the nadir of the cone. If you share my agnostic humanism, this plot may sound a bit repulsive, but the poem is full of suspense, drama, empathy, and what I can only describe as a sort of voyeuristic glee at encountering characters in such fantastic and spectacular misery.
After a series of lively discussions in class, my anticlimactic writing assignment dully asked students to analyze how the punishments suffered in Dante’s hell match the sins the damned had committed in life. Grading their responses was unspeakably tedious. Instead of resenting my job or the student authors, however, I had to face the fact that there was a real justice to my boredom. Since I’d required my students to lumber through my ill-conceived assignment, I in turn was condemned to wade through their inanities. Boiled down to a cliché (as, I assure you, all my insights can be): You do the crime, you pay the time.
My most frequent “sin” in designing writing assignments is failing to consider how dreary students find the writing process. Fixated on the advanced techniques of assignment design (clarifying goals and expectations, telegraphing grading criteria, extracting an appropriate learning outcome, etc.), I tend to skip over what should be the first questions of assignment design: Would I want to write this paper? Do I actually want to read the best possible answer to this essay prompt? It’s appropriate that, failing to account for my students’ possible boredom, I would suffer extreme boredom while grading their often competent essays. For sucking the joy out of the poem-reading and essay-writing processes, I was punished with a joyless grading session. Dante couldn’t have devised a more just hell.
So the following semester I made the writing assignment a bit more transgressive: “Have you ever told someone to ‘go to hell’ (or wanted to tell someone that)? Describe the scenario. What did the person do wrong? Use quotes and interpretations of Dante’s Inferno to describe what their punishment would be, and explain why.” The assignment still met my pedagogical goals — to have the students think critically about the text and articulate connections between its parts — but the students’ answers were so much more engaged, and reading their essays was much less a chore for me. Plus, as an accidental bonus, I think the assignment allowed the students to experience the cathartic, semi-therapeutic effects of imaginatively punishing people who’d wronged them — an effect that Dante himself certainly relished in imagining his hell, which is littered with personal enemies.
Of course, many students claimed to be too peaceful to participate: they’d never wished anyone eternal damnation at the hands of an angry god, and didn’t want to start ambling down such a vengeful path. But after a little prodding and brainstorming and encouraging of James Frey-style truth-stretching (also a common feature of first-person teacher narratives, ahem), everyone produced a victim.
As it turns out, the class included a number of scorned lovers. In The Inferno, excessively lusty sinners, including adulterers, end up in Circle Two, where their spirits whirl around in violent winds, in sight of, but never able to touch, the objects of their desire. I hadn’t predicted, though, that several of the cheated-on would call for Dante to reconsider the lenient positioning of the condemned cheaters; apparently the second circle, nestled between the “virtuous pagans” of Circle One and the gluttons of Circle Three, is far too cushy for such trash as these students’ unfaithful exes.
To my surprise, one essay boldly pointed out that, by making the students angry at people who’ve hurt them, I was forcing them all to join the ranks of “the wrathful,” who are condemned to attack each other without rest while covered in sludge in Circle Five. Sadly, as a consequence, I will spend eternity in one of the deepest parts of hell, the eighth pocket of the eighth circle, where I, with all the other “evil counselors,” will rove about zombie-like while completely engulfed in flames. Ouch.
The best outcome of the assignment came from students who had real-life sinners in mind, but couldn’t find a place for them in Dante’s seemingly exhaustive hell. There’s no spot in the medieval Catholic hell for, say, parents who don’t understand your long-term goals, or for bratty offspring. It’s not that Dante decided only to punish the very bad transgressors and let everyone else off the hook: even sinners as benign as indecisive opportunists are there, condemned to be stung constantly by swarms of insects and trudge through puddles of their own maggot-infested pus and blood. Since Dante’s Inferno didn’t speak to my students’ conceptions of right and wrong in many cases, the assignment forced them to notice the singularity of Dante’s hell, constructed for his very specific personal, theological, and political purposes.
I want to add a caveat here. I don’t believe that writing assignments are automatically interesting and pedagogically sound just because they require students to reflect on their personal experience. “Talk about yourself” is not, unfortunately, the magic answer for improving all my writing assignments. I know this because I’ve assigned some real clunkers. (Don’t ask your students, for example, to compare and contrast their own experience of New York City to that of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man; I can tell you, sometimes they feel invisible too and they also live in Harlem. It’s a commonly accepted but nevertheless wrong notion in composition studies that personal writing is easy, a sort of warm-up for analytical writing; in reality, to write a good personal, descriptive, and/or narrative essay is just as difficult, if not more difficult, than a good analytical one. My Inferno assignment worked as a personal/analytical hybrid because it asked students to do something very specific, both in their personal narrative and in their analysis.
In a later semester, I sheepishly admit that I was inspired by a New York Daily News headline on the day of Saddam Hussein’s execution. It read “Next Stop: Hell.” It made me realize that people still enjoy the schadenfreude of high-profile eternal damnation. So I expanded the Inferno assignment to ask students to consign various historical and contemporary figures to the appropriate circles of Dante’s hell. This added a component that I hadn’t originally considered, because it turned into an impromptu mini-lesson on both current events and notorious “sinners” from history. And, since students were again reluctant to condemn others, especially their favorite celebrities (one student on Paris Hilton: “Give her a break; she’s just living her life”), we had a provocative discussion about the waning cultural relevance of the concepts of sin and retribution.
Reading student responses to both of these improved prompts was actually enjoyable, so I’m going to go ahead and deduce that writing them wasn’t as boring as usual either. That’s the nice thing about Dante’s worldview: it is not just about sinning and going to hell; you can also do good and be rewarded. Now I know that thoughtful assignment design can lead us to divine essay-grading Paradise.
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