Confessions of an Eternal Teacher's Pet

I started grading papers back in high school. Perhaps because I was a top student, but more because I was a trustworthy sort, several of my teachers were willing to hand over student work for me to score. Essays and such, anything that required a subjective score, they did themselves, but I often got to mark up my classmates' multiple-choice quizzes, fill-in-the-blank work, and French dictations.

Several times, in my Advanced Placement Literature class, the teacher gave me papers to grade while the rest of the class watched a movie, and once she even invited me to come to school on Saturday to help out. After school, I often went to the library to make myself available as a tutor to lower-level French students, and when no one required my services, there were always papers to grade. This was an extra-credit opportunity available to all advanced French students - but for me it was a chance to feel valuable, mature, privy to secret things; a chance to rise above the ordinary rabble of the high school crowd and hobnob usefully with the Powers that Be.

Several teachers had said they would be interested in having me as a student aide if I were ever so inclined, but I never took any of them up on it until my last semester before graduation, when I joined a second-year French class to do basic classroom chores, preside over workbook reviews, and - of course - grade folder after folder of papers. The workbook reviews were my favorite, naturally; I got to stand up in front of the class while the teacher worked on other things (sometimes she even left the room) and direct the action. Not everyone understood why I would want to spend a precious hour of my school day as a student aide - why didn't I take another academic course, or use the free period to relax or get started on my homework? I explained that I hoped to be a college professor someday, so helping out in a high school classroom was good practice. I never mentioned the pure thrill of having authority over my fellow students, however borrowed and fleeting; the joy of having thirty pairs of eyes on me, a sea of hands raised for my attention; the satisfaction I felt at writing a grade in large red ink across the top of a quiz, doling out the measures of the burden at which I myself trembled all the rest of the day.

One of the highlights of my high school career must have been getting the chance to run Scantrons for my Spanish teacher. I was given a note which granted me access to the back rooms of the office building, the inner sanctum under the doorway prominently labeled "NO STUDENTS ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT." For the mild-mannered, unadventurous soul, there is perhaps no greater pleasure than being individually granted official access to forbidden territory. I fed the Scantrons one at a time through the machine, just as my teacher had demonstrated. Any teacher who had a free period just then might have walked by and seen me standing there doing their job just as competently as could be. Something inside the machine clicked as it laid down the little pink line next to every question that had been answered incorrectly; I could tell just by listening who had done well (thunk . . . . . . . . . . thunk) and who had failed (thunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunk . . . thunk). Let my classmates think what they would of my studiousness and sheer ineptitude on the high school social scene; in the Scantron machine I had my last laugh, a quantitative measure of the virtues of silence. As I returned to the classroom, the thick folder of Scantrons clutched protectively to my chest, I walked with a swagger and confidence deliciously foreign to my mundane existence.

A couple of times, my mother, who taught at an Episcopal elementary school, called in an excused absence for me and took me to work with her.  She did it once when she was teaching her students about the westward migration of the mid-1800s; this had been a special interest of mine since I was seven years old, and it was easy for me, clad in an old-fashioned dress, to ad-lib the part of a pioneer woman, telling the children of my adventures on the California Trail.  Another time, I got to serve as an escort on a class trip to Knott's Berry Farm.

The Episcopal school closed its doors the year I graduated from high school, and my mother found a job at another Christian school.  In the first months of the year, she told her third-grade students stories about her daughter who was away at college in Massachusetts.  When illness forced me to come home halfway through the school year, I may have felt disgraced among my family and my friends, but those third-graders welcomed me as if I were a minor celebrity.  They greeted me with enthusiasm whenever I came to visit the classroom; often they sought out chances to talk to me, and they were delighted whenever I took part in a lesson or class activity.

My mother teaches seventh grade now in a public school, and I have the privilege of lightening her workload by grading stacks of papers and occasionally helping to create assignments.  These days, I grade everything from spelling tests to essays to year-end projects.  Because I have plenty of time on my hands, being unemployed and not currently in school, I am able to give the student work more time and attention than my mother could easily afford; she has repeatedly expressed delight in the thoughtful, corrective, and encouraging comments I write on the papers she passes back.  Another advantage for her in letting me do the grading comes from my near-eidetic memory for verbal material; I have a knack (and a passion) for detecting plagiarism.  Year after year, I have seen plagiarism decrease over the course of the school year as each new batch of students learns they simply can't pull one over on me.  My mother has been known to invoke my name to put the fear of God into them: "Now, I'm going to have Truth grading these" is apparently all it takes.

I make a little money grading for my mother, and I love feeling that I am contributing to the education of the young people in her class, if only in a small way.  I enjoy collecting the sometimes hilarious misunderstandings and malapropisms that show up in student work.  Most importantly, I love knowing that there is something important that I am trusted to do, under the belief that I will do it thoroughly and well.  Still the teacher's pet, after all these years.