Teaching College Writing in the Pre-Canvas Days

I’m glad academia has gone digital. No more heavy boxes of printed essays to lug home. No more gradebooks with smeared records.

I remember we used to have to bring our grade and attendance records to campus during the semester break and get our records approved before we were truly free to enjoy our vacation.

Like a beleaguered instructor sent on a doomed mission, I had to drag myself to the campus, lugging a mountain of paper that looked like it had survived the apocalypse.

My stack of grades and attendance records—yellowed, dog-eared, and adorned with enough coffee stains and White-Out smudges to pass as a Jackson Pollock reject—was a bureaucratic nightmare in physical form. I found myself in line with a hundred other sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled professors, each clutching their own messy masterpieces like they were carrying the Dead Sea Scrolls. The line outside the Office of Records was so long it could have served as an endurance test for Navy SEALs. To stave off starvation and existential dread, I had packed a comically oversized sack of protein bars and apples, as if I were preparing for a month-long siege rather than a simple bureaucratic ritual.

There I was, supposed to be basking in the sweet, sweet nothingness of semester break, but instead, I was condemned to a gauntlet of waiting that made Dante’s Inferno look like a walk in the park. For what felt like hours, waited for the privilege of sitting at a table and enduring the laser-like glare of humorless bureaucrats who would scrutinize my records as if they were forensic experts analyzing evidence from a high-profile murder case.

Once I finally managed to wade through the outdoor line, I advanced to the foyer for the second, even more soul-crushing phase of The Great Wait. Inside, rows of desks manned by expressionless drones awaited, each one peering over piles of grading records that seemed to stretch back to the dawn of civilization. Behind the staff of functionaries who examined the professors’ gradebooks were towers of file boxes stacked so precariously that a single sneeze could have transformed them into a cataclysmic eruption of dust and possibly asbestos.

Eventually, I was summoned to one of the desks where an eagle-eyed Attendance Priestess scrutinized my records with the intensity of a customs officer suspecting I had smuggled contraband. She licked her fingertips with the solemnity of a high priestess preparing for a sacred ritual, only to cast me a look of such disdain you’d think I’d just handed her a wad of toilet paper instead of my gradebook.

Finally, when the pinch-faced administrator deemed my records sufficiently unblemished and granted me the bureaucratic blessing to leave, it felt like I had just been handed the keys to the Pearly Gates. I didn’t walk to my car. I windsprinted because I feared the Attendance Priestess may have found fault with my records and would call me back to start the whole process all over again.