by Makeiva Jenkins

This year I agreed to be a WIP TA with some reservation. Coming from a background of being a language arts teacher, I realized grading writing is a huge responsibility and takes an astounding amount of energy to process. You can feel the weight of grading and being responsible for the success and failure of a student’s paper without even trying. You also feel the need to provide all the answers for your students to help them really develop their writing voices and focus their papers. Add to this, some students come with questions, some come with no questions at all and generally seek to only hear your opinion on their work.

This is such an open process, one that can easily allow the TA to completely dominate any conversation about the writing in question. With all of these considerations, it may become easier to give in and just give students the answer they seek about what they should do or how they should write something.

However, in my own growth as a WIP TA one thing that has stuck with me through my training—that I have never been explicitly told in my previous training—is not to take ownership of the student’s papers. It is not your voice that should  come through but theirs. Such a small thing, but it was so powerful for me this semester and guided me in each student paper I approached and each conference I had. I learned not to be all-consuming in my approach to grading and providing feedback. Challenging myself to remember this as I graded and participated in writing conferences, alleviated some of that responsibility and pressure I felt in grading papers.

I want my students’ voices and stories to shine and come through.

As I engaged in writing conferences, I fielded many questions that asked me what I thought they should do about a particular section or if they should integrate more of something or less of something else. I learned the best way to approach these things is to flip it back on them and have them think through the process. I know if I had given them a specific answer about what to do, that is exactly what they would have done, and I would have been reading my own thoughts, even if they didn’t agree with them.  As a writer, that is exactly what I do when I receive advice and feedback from my professors, even though I don’t always agree with it. I want my students’ voices and stories to shine and come through. This may not always be the easiest path, but I believe it makes students betters writers, and it forces them to stretch their own understanding of what writing is for them and to them.

Hence, this always remind me that grading writing and teaching about writing is a process for not just the student but also for the teaching assistant. I am learning about teaching writing, about the process of writing, about the thinking process behind writing, and how teaching about writing also impacts my own writing. These are things that I gained by just remember that their paper is not my paper. Writing is a process that requires more than one person to be great, however, it also requires that those involved understand that writing is a rough process and a delicate one as well.