J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the famous first lines of The Hobbit -- "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty dirty wet hole ..." -- on a blank page of an examination essay on English literature he was supposed to be grading, sometime in the late 1920s.
I understand the impulse.
When you sit, as I do now, with a stack of ungraded blue-book exams, anything seems preferable to the task at hand, even writing a 300-plus-page prequel to an epic trilogy requiring the invention of languages, whole races, worlds.
What is it that is so onerous about grading? Well, even at a good college, most of the writing will be uninspired and some of it actually bad. But that can't be the whole reason. After all, as work goes it's still pretty cushy (you can do it at a coffee shop or while watching a ballgame), and some of the essays will be excellent. The student who sits in the back of the room and never speaks will write something perceptive and witty; a first-year student will have worked astoundingly hard and seen something that you have missed for years.
So why the procrastination? Or more precisely -- at least in my case -- what makes this procrastination different from all other procrastinations?
Every grader of blue books was once a writer of blue books, so it might help to think about the process from that end.
I remember, with particular shame, a certain undergraduate essay exam of my own for a course in "Modern Moral Philosophy." The professor was Philippa Foot, who must have been in her early 60s at the time. I was wholly convinced by her attempt to renew Aristotelian virtue ethics (I still am), and that was part of the problem.
In answer to her essay question, I parroted her anti-Humean line without really making much of an argument -- as if I were an academic peer chit-chatting or a grad student sucking up. In the margin next to precisely the paragraph where I should have made some substantive argument, she wrote in her strong cursive hand, "But why was Hume wrong here?" and gave me a B or maybe even a B-, along with a note at the end of the exam expressing measured disappointment.
At the time, I was ashamed for having failed to really "do philosophy," as we were taught to say. Now I am ashamed for a different reason. How could I have wasted her time like that?
Professor Foot -- after a good 30 or so years of serious teaching, writing, and thinking, and at 25 years past my present age -- was still correcting the glib meanderings of 19-year-olds. As a student, I owed her more, and as a teacher I wonder whether I will practice the same patience and attention to detail (two of the pedagogical virtues) when I am at that stage of my career.
Good essays present a different challenge. As a grader making my way through that big blue pile, it is all too easy to see that a particular essay deserves an A, assign it, and move on, without ever really reading the student's work.
On the other hand, if you do take the time to truly respond in your comments, it is very likely that the student will ignore your remarks and flip impatiently to the grade (or check it online, leaving the essay to languish in the department filing cabinet.)
I don't have a real solution to that problem, and I am skeptical of utopian fixes that would abolish exams altogether or replace thematic essay questions with Web-based gadgetry. I know that the blue book and ballpoint pen are aging technologies, and that the hastily scrawled essay is probably on its way out. But I doubt there is a sound replacement for the requirement of a carefully composed essay on an assigned topic, written in two to three hours, whatever the technology.
In short, what is called for at the end of a course in the humanities is a choreographed intellectual dance in which at least one of the partners, teacher or student, will likely stumble.
What the teacher wants is a synthetic summing-up, or a challenge, or even just genuine puzzlement. I don't want to be given my own argument about the inevitable tensions of Jewish thought, minus the details, any more than Professor Foot needed my sophomoric concurrence on the ultimate sterility of Hume's "is-ought" distinction. And what the serious student wants is a final moment of teaching.
But such exchanges are rare, and there is that big blue-bound stack of paper to grade, as the afternoon light fades, and the registrar waits.
So perhaps what makes this procrastination different from all other procrastinations is that what you as a professor want and owe is an epistolary exchange, an intellectual connection, and what you know is that those 30 blue books represent 25 and maybe even 30 failures to connect -- and that the failures will be, often as not, your own.
As I say, I don't have a solution to this problem, but I do have a new policy. Students who want extensive comments have to request them on the front of their exam and commit to picking it up and discussing it with me at the beginning of the next semester. Of course, that doesn't guarantee that I will receive the great American blue book, or that I will live up to my obligations as a teacher and reader, but it might help.
I once read a memoir in which a woman wrote about having Vladimir Nabokov as a teacher, I think during his time at Wellesley. He was standing behind a desk stacked with exam books. The memoirist's exam wasn't on the desk, and when she shyly approached him, he whipped her test from behind his back with a magician's flourish saying, "I wanted to see what a genius looked like!"
Genius is rare. Even inspiration is pretty scarce, but we should encourage it, aim for it ourselves, and be ready to recognize it when it comes, even at the end of the semester.
