English-teacher writing

      Just now I'm marking papers for an online class, and it's taking forever because I can't stop myself from writing comments.  Once I've made a correction, I have to explain why.  And before long, I've written a whole paragraph on why the writer meant to say "that is" instead of "with that said," or "born" instead of "birthed," or "chockfull" instead of "chocked full." (I had to look that last one up, actually; I've used it myself for years but had never thought about how it's spelled or where it came from.  It's pretty interesting.)
      I'm often asked whether I write anything myself.  Well, the answer I came up with a few years back still holds: "Yes, volumes--in the margins of my students' papers."
      For years my friends and family have heard me moan about having to "grade papers."  Just lately I've realized that though I do hate "grading"--putting a letter on them--I actually do enjoy commenting on them. What I hate is that there is never enough time to write all that I want to say.       
       My students have no idea how much I care that they become good writers.  They have no idea how much their ideas and even their mistakes inspire me to think and to look things up.  They have no idea how much writing goes on in my brain that never gets put down anywhere because I have to move on to the next comma splice. 
      And of course they have no idea how disappointed I am when I'm having to waste my life reading fluff or garbage that they spent ten minutes on (because I failed to inspire them with a topic they care about!), or when I see "separate" or "woman" or "Bible" misspelled for the billionth time, or--worst of all--when I discover that it's not even their own work but some essay from stealthisessay.com (why do they think I would want to grade someone else's work, who's not even in the class? Both of us are wasting our lives in that case. That's not what they're thinking, of course; in fact, they are not thinking at all). 
     But even as I whine right now, I'm having a good time.  I do love to write, and I do want to write more, even while I keep spewing details about semi-colons into their margins.