Re-cycling

Today at noon I met with small groups of my Creative Nonfiction Writing students to talk about the latest draft of their semester-long projects, which they subsequently turned in; tonight at 6pm, I’ll hand back a batch of essay drafts to one of my Environmental Literature classes, and we’ll spend some time in class working on revisions. And this afternoon at 4pm, I’ll meet with another section of Environmental Literature, sitting down to discuss Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge after not handing back the batch of essay drafts I’d promised them. In the maelstrom of incoming and outgoing student essay drafts that is April, I didn’t get to the bottom of that particular paper pile.

This is the endless loop that is my April: I hand back one batch of student essay drafts for every two batches still waiting for me to read. It doesn’t seem to matter how I schedule or stagger individual essay due-dates: in April, there are always more essays to read. At times at this point in the semester, I feel like one of those multi-armed Hindu goddesses, except instead of holding a single sacred object in each hand, I hold the various tasks I’m juggling: in this hand, a folder with papers I need to return; in that hand, a folder with papers I’ve just collected; and in another hand, a laptop with emails I need to answer. No matter how many hands I can find, those hands are always full, and all of my appendages feel like they’re spinning like a crazy windmill of collecting and returning, collecting and returning, collecting and returning.

In April, in other words, there’s no stopping the madly-out-of-control merry-go-round that is the life of a writing instructor: assign it, collect it, read and comment upon it, return it…then repeat, repeat, and repeat. At some point at the beginning of May, my students will give me their final projects for good, and I’ll grade my way to the bottom of those paper piles and be done with them. But between now and the beginning of May is the madcap month of April, “that time of the semester” for those of us who teach writing.

We writing teachers tell our students that writing is a process, not a product: it isn’t a matter of getting your essay perfect the first time, but of returning to it time and again until you get said whatever it is you’re trying to say. At this point in the semester, I feel like I’m up to my eyeballs in everything my various students are trying to say. Grading final papers is grueling enough, and reading essay drafts is even more daunting. Again, again, and again, you watch your students struggling to articulate whatever it is they’re “trying to say,” and you do everything but hold your breath and repeat incantations to your god of choice to help them through the labor of that creative birth.

In April, teaching itself feels like a repetitive, cyclical process: once again I’m walking students through the process of detangling the skeins of their own thoughts, and once again I’m scrambling to read batch after batch of student papers, waiting for each of my students to have that “a-ha moment” where their paper finally falls together. It’s easy for students to lose hope that this will ever happen, and it’s easy for their teachers to lose hope, too, especially when the paper piles are particularly high. During this time of the semester, I take comfort in the thought that Nature herself is in the throes of her busy season, producing draft after draft of green fecundity, each new leaf destined to face the inevitable cycle of grow it, kill it, mulch it, decompose it…then repeat, repeat, and repeat. All of it–every draft, every word, every green cell and leaf–is compost in the great soil of creativity.