Marking Season

This term I became a teaching assistant, which means that for the past three weeks my kitchen table has been occupied by ninety-two undergraduate lab reports, arranged in three piles that I have named, in my head, fine, we need to talk, and how. The piles are unstable. Reports migrate between them at midnight. The third pile is taller than it has any right to be.

Nobody warns you about the vertigo of the other side of the desk. Eighteen months ago I was the student whose reports someone else stacked on a kitchen table. Now first-years hold the door for me and call me miss — one memorable child called me professor, and I corrected him so fast I frightened us both. The distance between who I feel like and who they see is, on some days, the widest thing I have crossed since the Indian Ocean.

The politics of ink

Before the first pile, I made one decision that felt small and turned out to be the whole philosophy: I refused the red pen. My own undergraduate reports came back from one particular lecturer bleeding red until the page looked like an accident scene, and I can still feel, ten years later, the specific shrinking that produced. So I mark in green — teal, actually, a colour I chose because it is the colour of the sea at Galle Face and of half the equipment in my lab, and because no one has ever felt condemned by teal.

The ink is the least of it. The real work is the sentences. It took me one full evening to learn the difference between this is wrong and here is where this stops being true — the second one costs three more words and teaches something. I keep a list of comment patterns taped above the table now:

• Name what works first; they cannot hear anything before that
• One big thing per report, not eleven small ones
• Questions teach better than corrections: “what would happen if…?”
• Never sarcasm. The page cannot smile
• Write the comment you needed at nineteen

Office hour

The reports come with a weekly office hour, and the office hour comes with its own education. A student came in on Tuesday to dispute a mark — arrived braced for battle, sat down, and it emerged within four minutes that the report was written the night his father was in hospital. We talked about extensions, about the university's mitigating circumstances process, about how to email a lab head without apologising for existing. The mark was never mentioned again. I marked his resubmission last night: the we need to talk pile lost a member, and the fine pile gained one.

The accent in the room

I will record this honestly, because this journal has a policy. Before my first tutorial I spent an absurd amount of preparation on my accent — rehearsing the word hypothesis, flattening my vowels toward some imaginary BBC midpoint. Then I stood in front of thirty teenagers and discovered they do not care. They are nineteen; they are thinking about lunch and their own terrors. What they notice is whether you can un-stick them when the error bars make no sense, and whether you are kind about it. By week three a girl from Jaffna had started lingering after class to talk, first about coursework, then about homesickness, then about her grandmother's crab curry versus my mother's — a debate we have agreed cannot be settled on this continent.

In seminar last June I learned that a voice is something you spend. Marking season has taught me the second half: sometimes you spend it on other people. The teal sentences, the office hour, the girl from Jaffna — none of it goes in my thesis. All of it is the doctorate.

Ninety-two reports, done. I posted the marks this morning and celebrated the way my mother would: I cleaned the kitchen table until it shone and cooked something complicated on it. Next term they are giving me a second tutorial group. The how pile, I am told, regenerates.