So here’s a side to teaching that most people don’t realize: teaching is more about fostering the students’ belief in themselves than it is about building skills and knowledge.

For a student who believes in himself, the skills and the knowledge will come, because he KNOWS he can do it. For a student who’s been beaten down by failures, he only knows/thinks that more failures are in his future, so his ability to even try becomes a challenge.

It’s not appropriate for a teacher to praise something that isn’t worth praising. However, it’s also not appropriate to continue to beat down a student who is struggling.

So where does that leave a teacher?

In a tough spot. A really tough spot.

Sometimes, when I am grading an essay, I can tell that the student worked really hard on it. I can almost feel the struggle. Sometimes, that essay is just this side of horrible, though.

That’s when the battle starts. Do I find something—anything—to compliment, even if it’s barely a compliment? Or do I tell it like it is?

Obviously, I have to let the student know what he did wrong so that he can make improvements (and, indeed, that’s when the joy of teaching comes in: when a student starts to make improvements and becomes a better writer). However, too many red-marks on the paper can shut a student down, make him incapable of seeing what he needs to improve.

I grade advanced placement essays every year in Kentucky. I read somewhere between 1000 and 1500 essays during the week that I am there, and I can read so many because I do not make any marks on the essay itself. I determine a score, bubble that score in on the scantron sheet, and move on to the next essay. I don’t know the students (indeed, the essays come from kids from all over the country), so there’s no emotional investment on my part. My heart doesn’t break for the student when I have to bubble in a failing score.

In my own classes, though, it’s much different. When I have a set of essays come in (which is at least once every week), my friends know that I will be out of commission for a few days, because I will be spending every spare moment grading. What they don’t know is why it takes so long….

It’s time-consuming to find a balance of criticisms and compliments. And sometimes I have to truly search for compliments. I have gotten so desperate as to compliment a student on her handwriting or on the fact that she used effective parallel structure (even though her content wasn’t even in the ballpark, even though the content might have metaphorically not even been in the same city as the ballpark).

I’m not complaining, by the way, because it’s made me a better person. Being able to see the tiny bit of good that may exist in the midst of overwhelming failure is a skill that I wouldn’t trade in exchange for easy-grading.

Why does this matter? In this age of education-reforms that so often don’t take into account the individual students and only focus on test scores, I think it’s important to remind people of the bigger picture…of the whole student, the student as a person who has emotions and whose emotions are often linked to his success.