With the school year over, remembering teachers

I hate marking. Evaluation, grading, assessment or whatever.

And it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether I am putting a number, a letter, or just comments on whatever my students have been required to “submit.”

Even that word reflects the imbalance of power — assignment submission means the students’ submission to me, knowing that my opinion about their work might shape their future. I always hope they realize I am not grading them — just their work.

Over the past few years, there has been considerable debate in these pages about how we should grade students in our public school system.

Yet there has been little debate on what those students are (or should be) learning, or whether it is going to be of any value in their lives ahead as Canadian citizens.

As a post-secondary teacher who deals daily with the results of that school system, I have had zero input into its evaluation. No one asks me whether the students are prepared, or what could be done better.

One conversation I had many years ago has stuck with me, however. A tenured professor, who had consumed more beer than usual, fumed about the prestigious engineering faculty where we both worked. He said “if you select for the best and brightest, you can tell them to learn the multiplication table backwards by tomorrow morning, and most of them will do it successfully. But that doesn’t mean that they should, or that it is useful, or that it makes any sense.”

He was right. I can still hear his voice and see the frustration on his face every time I start to mark yet another assignment. Does it really matter to them? To anyone? What have they learned by doing it? Anything at all?

While I would like to think things were better back when I was a student, I am not convinced. My teachers must have taught me something. I’m just not sure what it was, or whether what I learned was because of what they tried to teach me, or despite their best efforts.

So, I don’t remember curriculum. Or lesson plans. Or important information. My math skills today would barely let me escape middle school. Geographical facts are obsolete or fragmentary trivia answers. Reading and writing require constant practice, still.

I kept some grade school assignments both to jog my memory and to undermine any smugness about what I do now. I especially appreciated the teachers who marked me, not only for what I submitted, but for what I could have done, had I worked harder. However much that critical assessment stung at the time, they were usually right.

The best teachers, however, were those who tried, who cared, who were honest with what they thought and felt, who made mistakes and owned them. Vulnerable, not power-tripping. For those teachers, their respect mattered more than any grade they were compelled to give me.

I was a science nerd in high school. I took French because it was fun and English because it was required. Mostly, I found the Grade 11 English curriculum boring and unimaginative — despite what my teacher did to jazz it up. In Grade 12, however, she cut me loose for independent study — perhaps tired of dealing with my disruptions in class!

So, I chose to read the plays of George Bernard Shaw — all of them — and then wrote what was no doubt a terrible essay, weaving them together. Inspired by my freedom, I then segued to reading P.G. Wodehouse and all about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. My final assignment — a poetry collection — was typed through the night, the day before it was due.

Her brief, thoughtful, affirmations of that assignment have stayed with me. I still occasionally write poetry and lyrics (perhaps someday they might be worth publishing!). From this experience, I learned not only that words mattered and could change the world, but that my words mattered, and could do the same. That realization shaped the trajectory of my subsequent academic (and literary) life.

So, at the University of Winnipeg, putting science aside, I was inspired by Don Jewison’s ironic comments on e.e. cummings, as pigeons fornicated by the open classroom window; by Fahmy Farag’s delighted and whimsical insights into W.B. Yeats; and by Clem Wyke’s profound understanding of John Milton. The rest, you could say, was history.

As a teacher, I know that sometimes it takes a while for students to appreciate what they have learned. So, 49 years after I graduated from the high school in Selkirk, I want to say a long overdue, heartfelt thank you to my English teacher, Mrs. Patricia Fenske, for her wise teaching. It made a difference for me, and I’m sure for many others as well.

While I will always hate marking, I have tried to pay forward in my own teaching the best of what I learned or was taught.

Someday (in a few decades, perhaps?) someone might tell me that it mattered, too.

Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba.