When I was doing the whole college search thing, one aspect I pretended to care about was classroom size. I never fully understood the idea of wanting a smaller class size, where your professors paid more attention to you, resulting in a more immersive learning experience. The only attribute I’ve noticed from my classes of under 15 people was a severe lack of dedication to raising your hand and thousand-yard stares.
If anything, I’ve noticed that with any size class, I desperately feel like my professors aren’t really reading my work.
Writing, in school, was coined one of my strengths in early education. A residual weakness that was also presented to me in my early education was never proofreading my work. From there, I’ve felt a specific type of stress towards writing a specific way, fearing I would make a simple grammatical mistake, and lose credibility. I felt a watchful eye when I wrote all of my papers.
I’ve submitted horrible work. We all have, from high school to now, it’s hard to write something strong every single time. In high school, creative writing was the overwhelming majority of my papers, burnout was imminent. There is only so much you can write.
Recently, I submitted a small writing assignment for one of my classes. After over a month of my brain being inactive over winter break, I was ready to jump back into creating a piece of writing I was proud of. I submitted an assignment where I was unsure about the instructions, but at least I used some good adjectives. I didn’t anticipate full credit. That night, I received a grade not too much longer, full credit with no comments.
Are you even reading this?
I am going to acknowledge the fact that professors have so many papers and assignments to grade. I understand the workload created when becoming a professor, we all do. I can also acknowledge that not all of my professors refrain from leaving feedback, I have received wonderful adjustments more times than I can count. However, I have peers who have editing positions who balance workloads on top of leaving feedback on writing pieces.
As a student, the feedback loop seems to be uneven – an expectation is illustrated in the assignment description, the expectation is reached (or not), and if that expectation is not reached, you tell me how to reach it next time. My work is not perfect – I know it’s not, so why can’t I know why?
I started writing this article at the beginning of the week. Since that day, I received a B- on an assignment with no feedback. What’s going on?
When I write, I pour my heart and soul into those fifteen-page papers. I hate the feeling of my papers only serving the purpose of being put into a grading portal, adding or subtracting a tenth of a point to my GPA. Tell me where I went wrong. Tell me where I flourished.