It’s the Christmas season again, and you can feel that Christmas spirit everywhere. It’s the time of year when we’re inundated with the sights and sounds of the season: chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, two women coming to blows over the last Tickle Me Elmo.
We college professors have our own Yuletide sights to enjoy at this time of year. For us, it’s the Yuletide sight of long-absent students suddenly re-appearing at our office doors, much like the ghosts of Christmas past. These students all come with a common story: despite the fact that they haven’t been to class since early October, they REALLY need to pass this class or they will:
- Not be able to transfer to Harvard;
- Lose their financial aid;
- Get killed by their parents.
If I were to believe every student who claimed that his or her life was on the line over an impending failing grade, I’d have the blood of thousands on my hands.
Not that I’d mind, because at this time of year I really hate college students, even the ones who come to class. The reason for this is that, when I’m not answering the door to yet another long-absent student fearing for his life, I’m grading papers. From November 30 until the end of the semester, all I do is grade papers. My desk is awash in papers. I am so focused on grading papers right now that anything I see in print, I grade. I took a friend to dinner last night; when the waitress handed me a menu, I graded it. I gave it a C. (The thesis was clear, but overall it wandered a bit.)
It’s at this point in the semester that I wish I were a math teacher. Math teachers don’t grade papers; they give their tests on those bubble forms you may remember from the SAT. Students work out the problems and fill in the corresponding bubbles on the form. Then, after the test is over, the teachers run the forms through a Scan-Tron machine, and viola: Instant grades.
Back in college, we English majors used to sit around and laugh at the math majors. While they languished in the library hunched over their books studying trigonometric equations and non-linear functions with one variable, we were outside sitting in the sun reading Shakespeare and Thoreau. We were so smug.
Only now do I realize that the math teachers were the smart ones. Sure, they had to work their way through advanced calculus, but now, during the entire month of December, while the English teachers are locked up in their offices grading papers, the math teachers are hanging out in the teacher’s lounge watching Oprah and knocking back shots of Jack Daniels.
So this year I’m asking Santa to make me a math teacher. Or if he can’t pull that off, maybe he can just break all the Scan-Tron machines.
Mike Jensen——
Bio and Archives
Mike Jensen is a freelance writer living in Colorado. He received his M.A. in Professional Writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he wrote his first book, Alaska’s Wilderness Highway. He has since published Skier’s Guide to Utah along with humor, travel, and political articles for various magazines and newspapers. He is married with five sons, and spends his free time at a remote cabin in the Colorado Rockies.
