What am I supposed to do with that?

It was late. I was on the couch, pretending to be comfortable between the piles of graded, and to be graded. Wanting to move one last paper from the latter pile (by far the larger) to the other before calling it a night, I read through one senior's exploration of the concept of "American exceptionalism." Noting good arguments and places where more information would strengthen the writer's position, in the margin I wrote, "This would be a good place to add some statistics." Or I meant to write that. I was about halfway through the word statistics when I realized it was looking more like a child's drawing of some choppy ocean waves than anything resembling a word in any language. I looked at it through tired eyes and thought, "Oh, he'll figure out what that says," even as I knew that was hopeless.



As I flipped the last page and put the paper in the graded pile, I had a flashback to an email I received last year from a former student. There was a scanned copy of a paper attached. When I got to the end of the paper, I saw there was one paragraph where the instructor's only feedback was a question mark in the margin. The student's question: "What am I supposed to do with that?"

There was nothing on the page to answer that question.  Just a question mark.  A question mark the length of an entire paragraph.

I looked at the instructor's question mark, and from my vantage point as a writer, a teacher of writing, and someone with some background in the subject of the paper, I could speculate as to what he or she was thinking in the act of writing it - maybe it was "How does the information in this paragraph support your argument?" or maybe "There is something in here that doesn't make sense to me." or maybe "You seem to be drifting away from your focus here."  I could also see that most students, novice to the subject of the paper and relative novice to the act of paper writing, would have difficulty figuring out what to do with the question mark.  This piece of feedback, important enough for her teacher to leave on her paper, not only was not very helpful to the student's progress, it was frustrating enough to be undermining of it.

Now, I can't swear that I have never done the same thing, or something very similar.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I can swear that I have. Suddenly, I became very aware of how much unhelpful feedback I must have scrawled on student work over the years.

Realizing the power this simple question mark had, my first thought was that there should be some sort of Hippocratic Oath of teaching that every educator has to swear to when they enter a school building - something along the lines of "First, do no harm."

My second, much more actionable thought, was a reminder of something I try to stay cognizant of when I sit down with a stack of student papers to assess. The feedback is a part of the teaching. The things I write on papers should do more than just show students where they have gone wrong; feedback should help students find a way to get to right.

With that thought in mind, I reached over to the graded pile and took back the paper where I had illegibly scrawled, "This would be a good place to add some statistics," crossed it out, and rewrote it, careful to make sure my half-printing half-cursive writing was readable to someone other than me.  And I added an indication of what he could use the statistics for (something along the lines of  - "Statistics would illustrate your comparison clearly and move your support from just true to actually specific.").

Hoping I had now at least fulfilled my Hippocratic Oath of teaching, I resettled the paper in the graded pile with a nod to my former student and her feedback on the question mark.