Day at the Office

There’s a scene in Dances with Wolves where Lt. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) shoots a buffalo as it charges toward Smiles A Lot, a teenage boy. The buffalo instantly becomes lifeless. It face-plants and slides to a thunderous halt, stopping inches from the boy’s feet.

Today I arrived at my office at UNH feeling energetic and ready to read and evaluate a stack of personal essays for the textbook I’m editing. I grabbed the first essay, entitled “Summer of Change,” and made it two lines in before face-planting into my desk. I’m amazed at the efficiency with which students can suck your will to live.

I’ve come to a conclusion: essays about the death of a grandparent can be interesting, but not when written by college freshmen. There were a few other abused themes I had to deal with: prom night, the best summer ever, the car crash, the first kiss, the big game, and—for some weird reason—the dog that died of cancer. Dog cancer is apparently endemic to northern New England.

My office is on the third story of Hamilton Smith Hall, which is completely deserted now that the semester has ended. The lights are off, the halls are silent, and the bathrooms are clean. It’s eerie, but I enjoy the solitude. After Cinnamon, the third cancer-ridden dog, finally died, and the student realized that life is short and each day must be lived to its fullest, I limped from my office feeling like the buffalo after taking five shots to the chest.

I needed a diversion, so I grabbed a book off my shelf called Proust was a Neuroscientist, and began writing quotes from it on the whiteboards hanging on the office doors of my colleagues. There are 16 offices on the third floor, and I could only find five or six good quotes, but that didn’t stop me. On one white board, I quoted the copyright page. When I finished, I decided it was stupid, so I erased all the white boards and returned to my office.

I charged through another five essays and started having weird emotional responses. I found myself laughing at things that weren’t meant to be funny. I felt angry at one essay that was excruciatingly boring but had a fantastic ending that involved the student and a mentally-challenged girl spinning in circles on the front lawn of the high school. It was devastating and beautiful. Why did it have to come at the end of six pages of mindless wandering?

After reading an essay about a chubby twelve-year-old boy who rides a BMX aimlessly for seven pages, I decided my random white-board quotes were actually kind of funny, so I made the rounds and rewrote all of them.

It took four hours to finish the stack of essays. I felt sorry for the students on the bottom of the pile. In the beginning, I wrote thoughtful evaluations: Good use of narrative and reflection; strong descriptions; well organized. By the end, I was writing things like, Yawn.com, Could this BE any more boring? And, There’s 20 minutes I’ll never get back.

Fortunately, the students will never read my comments. These are just notes for the other editors to help us when we get together next week to decide which few will make it into the book. But maybe that’s the kind of honesty students need from their teachers. Maybe next semester I’ll take this more candid approach, with notes in the margins like, This paragraph makes me really sad. I don’t know why. Or, Really? That’s the big epiphany you had when Cocoa died of a brain tumor, that friendship lasts forever? Really?

On my way out of my office, I decided--after all--that the white-board quotes weren’t really that funny. So I erased them. But I didn’t erase the one with the copyright info. My colleague will probably think it’s a poem and spend an hour analyzing it.