It’s almost three on a Monday morning, and I should really be sleeping and refreshing myself for a long day of marking, planning and teaching tomorrow. Instead, I’ve been lying awake for hours. I can’t stop my brain from spinning and making unpleasant noises. To tell the truth, I’m not feeling so hot about things.

It hasn’t been a great weekend. I spent all day today, yesterday and the day before marking the major papers from my 101 classes. I marked 30 of them, and, without looking back and counting, I would estimate that almost half of the students failed, some of them very badly. I may be exaggerating in hindsight, but that is how it felt.

Now, there are all sorts of explanations for this – none of them, naturally, reflecting in any way on the quality of my teaching or the methods I’m using to assess them.

I’m only half joking when I say that. The truth is, when it comes to the things I am conscientiously and realistically trying to teach, many of my students are at least heading in the right direction. When asked to identify an important theme in a work of fiction, many of them are able to grapple with the concept and come up with something that resembles a theme, even if it doesn’t – let’s be honest – relate very meaningfully to anything profound that the story communicates. When asked to construct their analysis around techniques and devices that the author uses and relate the author’s use of them to the theme, the students are often able to at least explain what some important techniques and devices are (they like “setting” a lot, for example, and are also fond of “dialogue,” even though we never spent much time on dialogue in class), find some examples of the use of the technique in the text, and even, in many cases, clumsily make connections to the theme they came up with.

The difficulty is that I cannot, in fifteen weeks, teach them how to read and write in English. This is what I am expected to do in this particular course, in addition to teaching them basic essay composition and literary analysis.

Students are being admitted to this English-language college who, in addition to having very low-level comprehension, organizational and analytical skills, simply cannot write a comprehensible English sentence. And I am getting very tired of feeling that, no matter how much I try to help them and how hard they and I both work, they are doomed to failure in my course, and perhaps in college, period, from the moment they walk through the door.

It would be easy, but misguided, to blame the high schools. I have seen much to blame the high schools for in my other courses (and by “high schools” I do not mean high school teachers, but the miserable mess that is the public school system.) My 101 course, however, is geared to students whose first language is not English. Many of these students went to French high schools or are very recent immigrants. They may have received an excellent education in their mother tongue (although clearly many of them did not, as they lack many basic communication skills that, if they had learned them in their mother tongue, they might be able to tranfer in some form to English.)

The problem here is that these students need serious, intensive, remedial help in English reading, writing and oral communication before being admitted to an English college. I’m not talking about grammar workshops. Many of my students do grammar workshops in addition to the grammar work we do in class. I’m talking about courses in grammar, literary appreciation, cultural studies, and communication, perhaps a full year or more of such courses, the kind of studies I did as a French immersion student in university. At the very least.

Whatever help the college has been able to offer them has not been enough, and the college has not turned them away and told them that they aren’t ready for an English school. Instead, these students have been shuttled into my 101 course, in which there is simply no way I can teach them everything they need to know.

This is an across-the-board trend (at least within our college; I can’t speak for others) that is going to result, in some cases, in students receiving serious blows to their self-esteem and productivity and finally dropping out. In other cases, students will squeak through course after course (because it is impossible to structure fair and appropriate evaluation in such a way that all students who are not achieving are kept back), and so over time the education our college offers will be devalued to the point of being worthless. These students have been told that a CEGEP education is mandatory if they want to do anything with their lives, and have decided that for them, that education needs to be in English, and there are no other realistic options for them in a society where a high school education doesn’t qualify you to bag groceries. So they come to college without any of the skills that college demands, and the college lets them in, and then we are expected to teach them all the skills they lack, and it simply can’t be done.

(The other day, one of my colleagues from the math department told me about a conversation he had with one of the deans, in which the dean complained that all English teachers want to do is teach literature, not grammar or writing, and that we therefore aren’t doing our jobs. The math teacher took the dean to task for this preposterous pronouncement, but it gives a sense of the extent of the problem. If the people heading up our faculties have no sense of the impossibility of our task and claim that the problem is that we simply aren’t interested in doing it, what are the chances that the task will be adjusted to something possible anytime soon?)

My more immediate concern, however, is that right now I feel like a gerbil on a wheel. I read these papers and I wonder, “What, exactly, is my function? What is the good of doing this job when I feel I’m being placed in a position where it is impossible for me to succeed? I am completely and utterly exhausted because I am marking papers all day long during the week and for four or five hours a day on the weekends. I’m holding private conferences with almost all of my students every couple of weeks because I feel it’s the only way any real learning can happen. As a result, I am worn out to the point that I no longer get any enjoyment out of anything I’m doing. I snap at students who ask me simple questions or commit the unforgivable crime of being late or forgetting an appointment. I am ready to kill those two boys at the window who snicker every time I say the word ‘plot.’ (Note to those not in the know: the Canadian French word “plotte” is slang for female genitalia.) Where is my reward?”

Tonight, I am sincerely concerned that I don’t have it in me to do this job much longer. Years ago I told someone that if I didn’t walk out of my class feeling joy, I knew it had been a bad class. I also said that, when I stopped feeling that joy, I would quit my job. I don’t remember the last time I felt that joy. (That’s not true – I do. It was three years ago. Three years without job joy is too long.)

I have been resisting the nagging feeling that maybe it’s time to move on to something else. I’ve been doing an MEd, reading about education, writing a blog, trying to find a way to get that joy back. I’m starting to worry, though, that if I stay at this much longer, I may do actual harm. I’m worried that I may turn into one of those teachers that leaves psychological burns on their students, who lashes out or who shrivels them with her withering stare. I’m worried I may become one of those teachers I vowed I’d never be, the ones who just keep punching in because they don’t know what else to do with themselves, and who suck the life out of whole generations of students one little cohort at a time.

Maybe things will look better in the morning, or three and a half weeks from now when the semester is winding up. Maybe I’ll look those essays over again tomorrow and realize that things are not as bleak as they feel right now. But I’m wondering if there’s something else I could be doing that would be as important as I think this job is, and a hundred times more effective, a job where, at the end of the day, I could come home and say, “You know what? The world is better because of something I did today.”

I used to feel, without a doubt, that I had found that job. The more time rolls on, though, the less sure I am that that’s true.