Grades I Regret Giving*
Your essay on the broken toaster
Had poor grammar
But I cried when it got to
The part about your grandmother
Why did I give you a C?
I think of that essay every day
In your creative writing assignment
You wrote about how
A nude picture you commissioned for
Your boyfriend went wrong
I was embarrassed, reading it
You deserved a higher grade
I was wrong about the Crimean War
And that weird Wikipedia page
You quoted was legit
I was drinking cooking wine
When I read the paper
That ruined your GPA
You never went back to school
The essay you wrote about
Immigrants living 10 to a room
In your hometown
Still wakes me up at night
Why did I mark it down for spelling?
One night you snuck onto your
Father’s fishing boat with
The bad boyfriend
Your father caught you
Skinny dipping the
Next morning and you ducked under
The water and swallowed salt
Trying to hide your head
These are the things I remember about
Your B minus essay
As if they happened to me
You were a smart aleck
And cruel to the short kid
I overheard you making
Fun of my sweater, well
They don’t pay us much
Still I should not have taken
Points off because you
Reminded me of my step-brother
Bobby I did not know your
Father beat you when I was so
Hard on that paper
I now know you wrote on a park bench
After he kicked you out
I beat myself up about it every day
The short story about your
Botched 8th-grade circumcision was
So funny
Why did I insist you should have
Stuck to the prompt?
I don’t remember any of the essays
That got an A
I guess the paper you wrote about
The death of your sister’s
Cat Nibbles in the den
Was sentimental and
There were certainly
Comma splices,
So how come I am
Thinking of it now
Two decades later
As my cat trembles its last
Tiny fur breaths
On my lap?
–Ticky Kennedy
Poet in Residence
SchoolNewsToday.com
NOTE
“Instead of issuing zeros, penalizing late work, and grading formative assessments, teachers should make the classroom a place of hope instead of fear,” When Grading Harms Student Learning, Andrew Miller, Edutpoia
Also Read: The Longest Rubric Contest
Listen to our podcast, Friday Office Poetry, on Pocket Cast, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Anchor.
You can find this poem at Friday Office Poetry Episode 2