If you’re an English teacher, or anyone charged with assessing student writing, you already know what I’m talking about here. 

For the vast number of you who are not English teachers, allow me to explain. 

After beginning any new writing course, you’ll have a few classes full of niceties and writing exercises and sharing before you begin a slow process that consists of collecting student essays, assessing student essays, student indignation over the grading of said essays, then reassessing the revisions of the students essays while new essays are assigned, drafted then collected.

Rinse and repeat for the rest of the course. 

For English teachers, the stack of essays that need to be graded at any given moment is notoriously referred to as “The Pile.” The Pile of student essays starts to grow early in the course and doesn’t relent until your final grades are submitted. The Pile is daunting. The Pile is a horrible, ubiquitous, nightmarish entity that always lurks in an English teacher’s periphery at all times. 

Then comes the end of the course, and the final essays and portfolios, and The Pile reaches its comic peak, and it never seems to diminish. 

Some students seem to believe that their writing teachers, instructors and professors are assigning these essays out of sheer sadistic pleasure, that on due dates, we fold our hands and cackle maniacally while envisioning our students suffering. 

The opposite is true. 

For someone like me, I assign the work out my own lapsed-Catholic guilt, a feeling like I need to earn my paycheck and keep my students honest about real world expectations. Then, in these finals weeks, as the students’ final essays engorge The Pile, I print them out and just watch it grow, while I will do anything else except grade essays.

So here is a message for my students as I stare at The Pile: I know that I need to grade your final essays—and while I sanctimoniously preach against procrastination—first I must…

…learn how to soft-shoe while scatting. Give me a few days. While I have the innate rhythm of limbless elephant, it feels pressing that I learn these things before I dive into those final essays. 

…take my pug Buster for a walk then teach him to speak Mandarin. Pugs are natives of China, and while his flat nasal passages will make enunciation difficult—especially certain Mandarin tones—we’ll get there. However, first I need to learn to speak Mandarin.

…finish watching the baseball game and calculate exactly how much money I’ve lost on DraftKings in the past three months, betting specifically on Red Sox games, because I never learned my lesson. If I had learned my lesson, I might not be grading these final essays right now.

…write my column this week.

…listen to “Commie Drives a Nova” by Ike Reilly. If I have any useful advice for you, it is to surround yourself with music, poetry and art. Our souls use art as fuel. 

…sincerely wish each of you the best of luck. I understand you’re all staring at a powder keg right now, a powder keg filled with explosives made from student debt, unaffordable health care and housing, a decimated environment, and the abject cruelty being practiced by our leaders who promised to protect us. But don’t lose your passion or your hope for the future. The worst thing you can become is a cynic—like me.

I’d like to tell you that you’re all getting A’s but that’s just not realistic. If you all receive A’s then the grade becomes meaningless. You know this. So I guess I’m going to grade your final essays now. 

Just as soon as I…

You can help Nathan Graziano grade essays if you want to. Reach him at ngrazio5@yahoo.com