English Teacher for Hire

It occurred to me as I graded my seniors' Lord of the Flies theme essays that I'm not really an English teacher.

When I was in high school—or even in middle school—I wrote essays regularly for English and Social Studies classes. I recall having shorter (1-2 page) essays on a nightly basis, with some longer essays as major assignments due perhaps every week or two.

Although I feel like I am now forever grading as a teacher, very little of it is what I imagined would be a part of a normal English teacher's job description. My normal grading stack includes journal entries (scored based on ideas, not mechanics) and classwork assignments (mostly graded for completion because students will otherwise not attempt the work). Really it is my gifted and talented ninth grade students who write essays, and even those occur once, maybe twice per quarter.

At what point did the standards for a high school diploma become so low that graduating seniors consider a 2-3 page paper a major assignment? When did the job description for an English teacher include babysitting and assigning points for busy work?

Scoring essays is by no means fun; it usually proves to be a daunting task. This is usually because the students' essays are so laden with errors: typographical errors, syntactical errors, organizational errors; many of these essays, if they contain a thesis statement, have one that is incomplete or incoherent. We as teachers may assign fewer essays because the students don't do them or because the quality is so poor, but what we really should be doing is assigning more essays and more major projects so that students will gain the proficiency they need to truly earn that high school diploma. Then we could truly call ourselves English Teachers.