In spite of all the moaning and groaning over badly written papers, a teacher’s life reeks

Having been students, we all know that teachers suffer; but we probably can’t appreciate the highs and lows they feel when grading final examinations, the momentary exhilarations and the deep depressions on reading what their students have made of their courses.

John T. Walker, a member of the faculty at Fullerton College, has sent me a few lines he wrote for a faculty newsletter on that subject. “When I phoned a friend who teaches history at Cal State,” he says, “his behavior reminded me how depressed some of my faculty colleagues become while (and after) reading exams. In fact, my friend had allowed himself to become morose because of the misinformation and the poor grammar he was reading. . . .”

Walker himself rarely has such lows, he says, because he tends to focus on those few students who do well, and the many more who do well enough.

As for those who mangle not only the facts but also the language, he finds himself amused, in the late evening hours, by their comical misapprehensions, their inspired malapropisms, and their unconscious “historical insights.” He quotes seven examples that he excerpted from a single recent set of examination papers, with his own comments attached:

“Gandhi introduced nonviolent fasting.” (Walker: Violent fasting is rough on the esophagus.)

“Hitler was anti-semantic.” (He never did say what he meant.)

“Brezhnev wanted to re-salinize Russia.” (There are few things worse than a salty Commie.)

“Robespierre was a great painter or writer who looked at the gay side of life.” (Undoubtedly he left his heart in San Francisco.)

“Before the Revolution, France was divided into three groups: 1. clergy, 2. nobility, 3. common slobs.” (No wonder the French were revolting.)

“Danzig was a German foreign minister.” (Yes, he changed his name to Gdansk after World War II to blend into his new environment.)

“Trotsky wrote ‘War and Peace.’ ” (It must have been tough writing such a long novel while agitating the masses, plotting revolution, and making firebombs.)

As you can see, some of them make a kind of sense. Fasting, after all, is a form of nonviolent protest. Hitler was “anti-semantic,” in the sense that he used words, like our own government, to disguise the facts, as in “the final solution.”

Robespierre seems to have been mixed up in the student’s mind with the revolutionary thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the painter Henri Rousseau. In any case, at the time Robespierre was writing, the word gay (gai) meant high-spirited, not what it means now. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that Robespierre never married.

You see how complicated it can be?

By the way, Rousseau devoted much of his writing to the ennoblement of the common man, whose lot, in 18th-Century France, was sordid enough to justify the epithet “common slob.”

Walker has also sent me a copy of “Life Reeked With Joy,” an essay composed by Anders Henriksson, a Canadian historian, from phrases in papers by freshmen at McMasters University and the University of Alberta. In the past few years several others copies of this composition have been sent to me--mostly reprints in college faculty publications. So it is no stranger to our faculty lounges. The latest comes from Les Boston of Los Angeles Valley College.

One reason I have not written about this paper is that it is hard to convey its flow and humor with brief excerpts. After all, it covers Western history from the Middle Ages to World War II.

But evidently it is an underground classic, and it has comforted many teachers who wondered if they had been alone in their sense of persecution. It begins:

“During the Middle Ages, everybody was middle aged. . . . Middle Evil society was made up of monks, lords, and surfs. Merchants roamed from town to town exposing themselves and organized big fairies in the country side. Mideval people were violent. Murder during this period was nothing. The Crusades were a series of military expeditions made by Christians seeking to free the holy land (the home town of Christ) from Islams. . . .

“Finally, Europe caught the Black Death. The Bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras. It was spread from port to port by inflected rats. Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. . . .

“The Middle Ages slimpared to a halt. The Renaisence bolted in from the blue. Life reeked with joy. Italy became robust, and more individuals felt the value of their human being. It became shiek to be educated. Europe was full of incredible churches with great art bulging out their doors.

“The Reformation happened when German nobles resented the idea that tithes were going to Papal France or the Pope thus enriching Catholic coiffures. An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door. . . . “The enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltaire wrote a book called Candy that got him into trouble with Frederick the Great. . . . The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened. . . . It catapulted into Napoleon. Napoleon was ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. . . .

“Germany was displaced after WWI. This gave rise to Hitler. Germany was morbidly overexcited and unbalanced. Berlin became the decadent capital, where all forms of sexual deprivation were practised. A huge-anti-semantic movement arose. . . .

“War screeched to an end when a nukuleer explosion was dropped on Heroshima. A whole generation had been wipe out in two world wars, and their forlorne families were left to pick up the peaces. . . . “

And despite all that, life reeks with joy.