Can I Give a Smiley Face?

Teacher response is, undoubtedly, a primary source of stress for me when I’m grading papers. Obviously, I want to encourage my students, because I recognize the immense stress that graded papers bring them. Getting a paper back is horrifying, is something that students dread. In many ways, it’s very similar to the way that Christians view the Second Coming. It’ll be great, if you’ve been good, but, judging from past experience, maybe you haven’t been as good as you’d have liked to have been, so it might be really, really bad and/or hot.

NOTE: Please do not think that I’m comparing myself with deity. Such is not my intent. Rather, I simply mean to illustrate the intensity of emotion that surrounds receiving a graded paper.

Thus, I try to take it seriously, and I appreciate articles like this that give varying theories about how to write student comments. Firstly, I am appalled by the mean-spirited and downright nasty comments that the author selected from his primary sources. Again, the student ego is a fragile and delicate thing, something that must not be crushed. The students, even as seniors, are just beginning their collective journey into adulthood and education. A nasty comment could derail them. Perhaps we say, in our supposed wisdom, that we want to derail them, to crush their ego or arrogance and “wake them up” to their situation of poor grammatical awareness. I disagree. There are better ways to do it. Properly done, a students’ ego can be used to motivate them.

Thus, the question remains: How do we motivate students with proper comments? I’m a proponent of being short. Of course, I realize that the authors may disagree with me. Also, the authors and I may disagree over what, exactly, constitutes “short.” They state, “A teacher with too many students, too many papers to grade, can pay only small attention to each one, and small attention indeed is what many of these papers got. A quarter of them had no personal comments at all, a third of them had no real rhetorical responses, and only 5% of them had lengthy, engaged comments of more than 100 words” (214). This attitude stands in stark contrast to the instructions which a friend of mine received; she was told to keep comments quick and to-the-point. Frankly, I think that the authors may be expecting a bit much—I doubt that students pay attention to comments over one hundred words (at least at first glance; if encouraged, the students may finally read the entire comment paragraph). While I certainly don’t believe in skimping on comments, I worry about overloading students; I also worry about practical issues, such as my time. Writing that much would take a long time. I hope this doesn’t make me seem lazy.

The authors are absolutely correct when they admonish us to “determin[e] those genres and tropes of response we tend to privilege [that] perhaps we can begin to learn how our students ‘read’ these teacherly tropes, which seem so obvious and helpful to us but may not be so easily deciphered by those still striving to enter the community we take for granted” (219). What comments do students look for when scanning our response paragraph? What words stand out to them? Maybe it is some misguided sense of making these “tropes” stand out that drives teachers to make mean-spirited comments. Again, I hope to find polite—yet effective—comments that students will respond to. I’m open to suggestions.