What Is My Responsibility?

When I took on my job of reading student essays (and it was just reading them in the beginning), my participation came from my neighbor who had been doing it for a few years after she had taught at the high school and while she was starting her family. I didn't get picked because I had sat through interviews or applied for the job; it sort of fell in my lap. No one even told me what the limits or obligations of the job were--I took instruction from the individual teachers who all had different standards and requirements.

According to the school district, I am only supposed to read the essays, note misspellings and grammar errors, and then return the papers for the teacher to read and score. Back when I took on the job, the AP classes were limited to 22 students but now there are far more students, up to 42 for all AP classes. Keep in mind that Utah has the lowest per pupil expenditure of all states. So over the years as the classes grew in size and the teachers were dealing with students in an English literature class who couldn't speak English (most of those were Chinese students), my involvement grew. The teachers were overwhelmed so I began to add comments and suggestions. I began to offer free tutoring. What good does it do to tell a Chinese language speaker that her words were misspelled, or that his verbs didn't agree with his nouns if you don't point out the purpose of an essay or the point of the prompt?

But now I am ready to stop, ready to leave this job. There is no one I know who can or will do this job, nor do I think it is my responsibility to do what the school district doesn't even care about. All the teachers with whom I work have declared that they will box things up to send to me and pay me out of their own pockets. Will students suffer? They will but most of them in these odd days won't understand that they will suffer nor do they care. "Why don't I get a 9?" Will me leaving change the class sizes? Not a chance.