Can This English Teacher Grade All of These Essays and Still Make Chili's Happy Hour? Just Watch
Wow, She's Good
An English teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, IL has some essays to grade but was also invited by some of her friends in other departments (math teacher, gym teacher—all with nothing to grade) to Chili’s Happy Hour.
Will she be able to grade all of her class sets and still make it on time to get the 5$ Margaritas?
“It’ll take some veteran moves,” she said unfazed. “But just watch.”
The teacher takes her giant stacks of 5 class sets and slams them on the desk.
“You think I’m taking this shit home with me during Easter break?” she asked to no one in particular. “Fuck that shit.”
For the next hour, the teacher goes through what appears to be some sort of grading montage played out in real time, with a Taylor Swift Pandora station providing the soundtrack. She’s quick yet efficient, almost as if there is some sort of “eyeball test” being done to a majority of them.
When asked how she does it, the teacher tells us she cannot reveal her methods because then she would have to kill us.
We laugh.
She is dead silent.
“Couldn’t have any loose ends,” she says with a cold stare.
“You think I’m taking this shit home with me during Easter break?” she asked to no one in particular. “Fuck that shit.”
One song changes from the next. Something from evermore starts to play and the mood goes from dangerous to stable, at least for the time being.
We’ve asked too many questions, and now she is suspicious of us.
“I will tell you this,” she says. “Since this is a holistic grading rubric, I can assign a single score based on an overall judgement of the student’s work.”
“So I start with my best student, Alex Ferguson. I know his essays are always going to be the best because his mom is also an English teacher and writes his essays for him. So if I grade his first, I can grade the rest of them against that one.”
“If it’s not as good as Alex’s mom’s, then they can’t get the A, see. That means the majority of these are probably C’s and D’s, so I only really need to decide if it’s good enough to get a B. And all my good kids get the B’s and I can give those based off of their names.”
What about an F?
She laughed like Brian Blessed, deep and booming, as if it came from some dark store somewhere buried in her black soul.
“F’s? F’s? We’re not allowed to really give F’s.”
Even if the student doesn’t do the assignment?
“No, they can get no lower than a 50. So that helps a little bit, right? Even if they only type a few sentences, I don’t even have to read it…just give it a 50. That helps me knock out at least half of these in a few minutes.”
So a student who tries his hardest, does the assignment to the full, and might not be the best writer could still just get a D when a student who only writes his name and does nothing else can get a 50?
“Yep…yep, yep, yep…” she trailed off looking back to her essays. “Harsh, but this is how The College Board trains its test scorers.”
She gives three quick 67s in succession and notices me staring at her.
“All three of them plagiarized from the same source. In fact, it was from a handout I gave them earlier in the unit.”
She says this nonchalantly, as if this is part of the normal routine. Par for the course.
She laughs as she grades one essay. “Oh you dumb asshole” she says as she writes a big 50 at the top of the paper. She begins to write “See Me” but has second thoughts and scribbles it out, turning it into a little happy doodle.
She shoots a look that says, “ooops whatever.”
After a few more quick, thoughtless scribbles on another twenty or so, she’s ready for Happy Hour.
“You coming? I’m buying…I wonder what the Marg of the Month is?”