Teachers Rhetorical Comments on Papers Response

I found this article interesting, and approached in a fair and unbiased manner. While the authors point out the harsh and authoritarian comments that teachers wrote on student papers ("This is just silly." "Throw away!"), they also pointed out the positive and encouraging remarks. Additionally, they noted that the teachers who graded these papers were more than likely overworked, with too many students and too little time/energy for all of them. When I first started reading this article, I was wary--braced for the overly harsh judgment towards composition teachers--but I was, alas, bracing myself for nothing. I feel like teachers, for the most part, do the best they can, and I felt like this was acknowledged throughout the article. There are easier and better paying jobs out there, and most of those who choose to teach for a living have other options.

A comment about the stats:
Even if most of the global comments were brief, I was impressed with the high percentage of papers with global or rhetorical comments: 77%. This was quite a bit higher than I would have suspected. There were other statistics I found curious, or surprising, for example that 25% of the papers had no grade on them.

I liked this quote:
"The primary emotion that they felt as they read through these teacher comments, our readers told us, was a sort of chagrin: these papers and comments revealed to them a world of teaching writing that was harder and sadder than they wanted it to be... (Connors and Lunsford 214). For some reason, this quote gave me a vivid picture of a thin, older woman with mussed hair and an ink mark on her cheek. She's single (probably divorced), and has cats and she eats cake for dinner sometimes. Perhaps she allows herself one cigarette a day. I feel like a sexist or something "ist" for admitting this, but this was the image I got.

I also liked the quote about the "...cryptic systems of numbers, fractions, decimals..." (Connors and Lunsford 209). Maybe it's the word "cryptic," but also the idea that a composition paper would ever need a fraction or a decimal. It would be interesting to see how the teacher arrived at such a precise number. Clearly, a teacher like this would have a system...