Brutal

And now I bitch.

I've begun the long, arduous task of grading my own students' papers, roughly half of which are on one of the two topics about the Russian revolutions of 1917.

I'm finding the reading and the grading rather trying and depressing because I've encountered so many papers that can only be described as bad to terrible. I've already given two zeros, both to papers that weren't even halfway to the 7- to 8-page limit required for the assignment. I've also given out a few D's for papers that are really quite terrible. But in general I've been utterly appalled by some students' total inability to write comprehensible prose. I mean, normally the emphasis in grading is -- or at least ought to be -- on assessing the quality of the argumentation and analysis. There's still plenty of room for that, but I'm finding myself having to do the prose equivalent of yelling at my students for being crappy writers. "Since your prose doesn't make any sense, I can't begin to ascertain what argument you're trying to make, let alone assess whether you've made this argument persuasively." Or something to that effect.

It's challenging, because normally I try to say at least something positive about every paper, just to give students some hope of improvement. But with some of these papers I don't think I could do that without being completely dishonest. Some students' papers truly have no redeeming qualities. It's flabbergasting.

And that doesn't even begin to address the issue of big, glaring historical mistakes. Many of my students have a greatly flawed understanding of the general contours and chronology of the revolutionary process in Russia. No, Bloody Sunday did not occur in 1917; try 1905. No, the Bolsheviks did not overthrow the tsar in February 1917; they overthrew the Provisional Government in October 1917. Good grief. I wouldn't necessarily expect my students to understand all the nuances of the revolutionary epoch in Russia, but at the very least you'd think they could walk away from this course with the big picture of what happened in 1917. How in good conscience can I give a paper like that a respectable grade?

So, I'm flummoxed. Even students who did well on the midterm are now demonstrating a startling inability to write a coherent sentence. Damn the mean, these papers are going to produce the worst grades I've ever given in a course. And the hell of it is that I'm not sure whether I'm not being punitive enough. And I still have another 20 essays to read. Argh.