The Well of Lost Teachers

One of the big goals that Desiree and I have for our tenure here (however brief or long it may be) is to overhaul the English program within our International American department to make it more robust and easy for new personnel without prior English teaching experience to move into. We're introducing a big-time new emphasis on vocabulary, writing detailed lesson plans, and focusing the individual semester emphases more tightly. I teach the second year of English, and second semester second year (i.e., the one we're in now) attempts to emphasize development of writing skills.

Practically speaking, this means that I teach a particular type of writing (narrative, descriptive, argumentative, and so on) and assign the students various and sundry papers to write in order to see if they've understood it. I then grade the papers, carefully marking their mistakes, and give them back to the students so that they may learn from their misdeeds (and, usually, from their misspellings).

I have one hundred and eighteen students. Teaching a writing course for the first time to one hundred and eighteen EFL students is kind of like living at the bottom of a deep well. A well filled with papers, specifically. Some of them are good, more of them are bad, and a few of them are plagiarized. I spend my time struggling to swim upward through these papers, and every few days, just about the time I get my head above the crimson ink and scribbled corrections, the students peer over the edge far above me and shovel another load of unfiltered syntactical obscenities down into the well. Sheets of A4 stock white flutter down onto my head, and, brandishing my red pen like an oar, I doggedly make my way for the surface again.

"No problem!" I shout up to the students. "Bring me another one on Monday -- 250 words, double spaced, and watch the infinitives this time!" The students, for their part, don't say much, although occasionally I'll hear a faint voice calling down to me, "Teacher, I have not typed my paper. Is it OK?"

Sure, sure, whatever. When you're drowning in comma splices, it doesn't make much difference whether the curlicues are Times New Roman or not. I vaguely remember that Elijah, my predecessor, didn't get out much. "D'you want to watch a movie tonight?" we'd ask. "Well," he'd reply reluctantly, "I'd like to, but I have about two hundred papers left. I'd better not." We'd make consoling noises and leave him to his work. Little did I realize that the reason we didn't see him that much was that he was stuck at the bottom of a well.

For my part, I don't really mind it down here. Sometimes you read some funny typos, and a few of the papers are genuinely interesting. If I find the bones of one of the previous teachers, though, I'm telling the students that we're watching movies for the rest of the semester.

Dave