Papers

    Incompetent.
    I know that voice speaks true, that I cannot. I stack and rearrange and still I can't do it.
    Just grade the darn papers already.
    I glance weary at the fluttering edges of sheets wrenched from battered notebooks and want to run away. Arithmatic pages have right answers; science quizzes can be defined by keys; grammar standards move glacially enough to dare say "wrong" or "right."
    Writing, on the other hand--that's all me. My opinion hold power like an Ahasuerus sceptor lowering down.
   And sometimes they write their hearts, let the defense down in pencil scrawls and how on earth am I supposed to define "good enough."
   And I fear that I am not.
   So I shuffle and ignore and get so very behind, because I do not want to assess myself over and over with how well I do. Because I lived in an assessment A through F for years, and nothing in me wants to go back.
   And then my 3rd-time freshmen tells of how her mom almost died and I want to praise the haphazard "sentences" to the sky because she looks at me now without that invisible guard up over her eyes.
    The goofball from the back row recounts a first kiss that I'm fairly certain never happened. I know he fills all empty moments with laughter because lonely silence is deafening.
    My most Ethiopian child's first Thanksgiving with her whole family, happy and loved.
    My angriest child's dream to sing, those short moments in which I see her joyful and free.
  
   Somehow, I am supposed to still mark the page.

   But I remember the weekly exchange of this angry child's writing for her red-pen scratches and the two years of affirming that I had a story worth telling well.
   My understanding might be weak and my work may never measure up. But I can invest in the trajectory of the stories slouching in fifth period.
   I dig the red pen out of my bag. Onto the first stack.