Tuesday 31 December 2013

Another Post Where I Write about Writing

Grading papers written by first grade students…debilitatingly painful.  One must remember they are just starting out.  It's their first tentative foray into the written word.  Wielding the sword of correction is a delicate operation that should prune just enough to encourage growth but not so much that it  permanently stunts the growth of my budding authors.  I hate it.  I want to hack and slash and cut out unnecessary verbiage, taking no prisoners.  But I can't.  So I groan and moan and drag my feet about it.

Logan noticed me crying out in literary pain and shuffling papers to the bottom of the stack because they were burning my retinas with their poor letter formation, or unintelligible spelling, or incomplete sentences or, more than likely, all of the above. He encouraged me to do all the hard ones first and get it over with rather than leaving them to the end.  I handed him one from the bottom of the pile and told him, "Here, YOU read this." He mumbled as he tried to decipher the words scrawled higgelty-pigglety across the paper.  Finally he handed it back and wisely advised, "Just shred this one Mom."