Becoming a man, yet keeping my feminine wiles and ways, a follow up:
In the bar partnership, I should note that, my newly discovered manliness in the wider world aside, there are ways in which I take a decidedly “female” role. In partner meetings (I have three partners in the venture), I find, surprisingly (although said partners may disagree) that I often take a somewhat people-pleasing role, wanting to resolve conflicts, trying to make sure that everyone’s voices get heard. Emily (one of the other partners) and I have been called “the girls” by our other two more manly male partners, I think for our desire to talk things through rather extensively (excessively?) and for our emotional reactions to issues and willingness to express and desire to talk through said emotions. So, while I wrote recently here about how, out in the wide world, I find myself behaving somewhat more like a “man,” within the Rendezvous team I seem to eschew the role of traditional pants-wearer, aggressor, whenever I can, which is just fine by me. Although I do like a nice pair of jeans.
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The Handwriting is on the Booklet
I’m spending three full days this week in a classroom with ten other English Department grad students assessing incoming UMass freshpeople’s writing placement essays (the third such session I’ve participated in this summer) and, as with any such task, it has become almost rote. At this point, I can tell a lot about – or at least, I can’t help making a lot of presumptions about – an essay before I even open the little blue booklet.
This is most likely one of the last years that UMass will have students handwrite their essays, and I think the change to computer-typed essays will be good for many reasons, but I’ll stick to the one related to gender. Simply from the students’ handwriting of email address and ID number on the cover of their booklets, I can tell whether a student is male or female 90+% of the time (I’ve been testing myself by covering the names with my hand and guessing). Women, or in this case, mostly 17-year-old girls, nearly all write very neatly with round, gentle, letters, some cursive, some not, and yes, some of them even make cute little circles to dot their “I”s. One actually did make hearts.
Boys write in assorted varieties of near-illegible, oft-psychotic-looking scrawl, except for the few that write with compulsive-nerd precision. Among the young men, I can even tell how assertive they’re opinions on post-911 government wiretapping or the perils of American prosperity (our two prompts) are likely to be by their handwriting – the jagged-er, the more testosterone is likely to surge through their prose.
I find that I make two major and unfair assumptions about the girls, so it would certainly be preferable not to be able to see names or even handwriting, to not know the gender (let alone nationality) of the writers I’m reading, as biases inevitably sneak into my (and I would argue, any grader’s) reading.
The main assumption I make about the girls, one that holds true a remarkable amount of the time, is that they’re likely to be more organized and to have put a better effort into their essays – that is, they’re more likely to try to please their reader. Initially I thought this gave the girls an unfair advantage when I’m their reader, but perhaps not. Do I, expecting said work from the ladies, project that expectation onto my reading, or do I, rather, end up grading them down excessively if they don’t meet my expectations (or if a boy exceeds my low expectations of him)? I just don’t know.
On a tangential note, I’ve learned that a remarkable number of these kids are trying their damnedest to believe that the NSA and the president have the best intentions and that if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t care if they read your text messages. They also believe that too much of a good thing is bad, that kids today spend too much time on the computer or in front of the TV (other kids, of course, not them); that things are different from when our parents were kids; that Roger Waters said that money is the root of all evil, and that George Orwell wrote the novel 1985.
Before you get too concerned about my biased ass determining the fate of our commonwealth’s youth, I should add that we’re assessing whether students are placed in a lower-level freshman composition class, a higher-level freshman composition class, or opt out of freshman writing altogether, and that the scale is constructed in such a way that we end up putting something like 95% of them into the middle category, standard freshman comp, so my bias (which of course, I also work very hard to counteract) isn’t all that crucial to these kids’ fledgling college experience. I also struggle mightily to be fair to those with horrible handwriting, nearly all of whom are boys, but it’s hard when you’re reading 150 or so essays on the same subject in seven hours.
