Every June for two decades, I have spent a week grading papers for the Educational Testing Service’s Advanced Placement Program. In English Literature, there are 1,125 high school teachers and college professors who are — at this very minute — grading 275,000 AP exams.
We began at 8:30 a.m. Friday, and will end at about 5 p.m. Thursday. That’s seven full days, with no weekend. Yet we love (almost) every minute of it.
Part of the draw is the feel-good atmosphere of the reading itself. Yes, there are lots of logistical problems — complaints about the food, particular hotel rooms or the air conditioning at the reading site. But there are almost no complaints about what actually goes on, as more than 1,000 people process three essays from each of 275,000 students.
How can that be? Let me count the ways. Most of us have hotel rooms overlooking Daytona Beach, Fla. As I write this column, pelicans fly past my window and waves sound their eternal rhythm.
After the first year, every reader looks forward to seeing the same faces from the year before. Like the bar in “Cheers,” each return is to a place where “everybody knows your name.”
If you stay long enough, those whom you remember from dinner become leaders, and you suddenly know “all the important people.” You find out they are still as nice and accessible once “important” as they were when they were mere readers, like yourself.
But the real draw is the ability to do something for students and for the educational process. A teacher’s job would seem to be that anyway — yet the crack-of-dawn classes, weekends grading papers and daily juggling of 140 student demands get to be a grind.
Everyone knows teachers make considerable sacrifices that we tell ourselves we are glad to make. Grading AP essays at Daytona Beach doesn’t seem like any sacrifice at all when the birds greet you at 5 o’clock, and a guest novelist reads his most recent work at 8 p.m.
Not to mention the heavy social calendar, as hundreds of teachers make arrangements to avoid institutional dinners. Over food and wine, we discuss our schools and what brought us into the profession in the first place. It’s a heartening exchange.
Someone always has a more repressive principal than you have (we all think, “How is that possible?”) or a larger class load. Some have tiny classes and brilliant students, but then we remember that these teachers are experts on fiction.
I would never miss a single year, because it is only during these readings that I am reminded that all students deserve our best efforts in advocating close reading and thoughtful writing.
That is what we reward on the AP test, and what the English classroom is all about. The other bureaucratic nonsense driving teachers crazy is, well, just nonsense. Teachers should all engage in an activity that reminds them of why they originally went into the profession.
That reminder will keep us focused for the rest of the year. Students may not thank us, but we get a chance to thank one another.
Or maybe we simply love the pelicans!
