I’ve experienced envy. I’ve witnessed my friend pick up a sheet of music and soon begin nodding his head in rhythm with what he saw on the page. Similarly, I’ve seen my wife stifle tears as she watched scenes of horses competing in show jumping. Also, I once happened to be riding on a country road in my uncle’s pick-up truck driving from his farm to town and noticed him slowing down to stare out at neighbors’ fields of corn.

They were all looking at the same thing as I was, but what they saw was a world that I couldn’t imagine. And I was sure that this ability of theirs was enriching their lives. Why couldn’t I have something similar in my life?

Then one day at school, I discovered that I actually did have something but just never realized it.

A student had emailed me her essay because she couldn’t come to class, so I sent it to the printer room from my office. A few minutes later, as I entered the printer room, I noticed one of the office assistants reading my student’s essay while he was waiting for his documents to print out. He yawned and said, “Ho hum. ‘The benefits of pets.’ Kind of boring.”

Back in my office, I started to read that essay. By the third sentence, I could feel happiness spreading through my body. I noticed that she had added variety to her style by not starting with the subject and verb. As I continued to read, I couldn’t help but smile at her effort at including an example in the second paragraph to support her topic sentence. The assistant who had read the paper in the printer room had probably not even noticed the example when reading it since the content was nothing special. But I loved the idea that the writer was applying that technique.  Of course there were some grammatical mistakes; those probably reduced the assistant’s appreciation of the paper. I, on the other hand, saw those mistakes as a result of the writer pushing the boundaries of her skill-set by using subordinators and conjunctions. And I could appreciate that.

I picked up the next student’s essay and started to read. I could almost feel my head nodding as came across techniques the writer was using, similar to my friend nodding his head as he looked at a sheet of music.

I realized that this special appreciation of students’ writing went beyond a personal connection to the writers, my students. And it wasn’t just me. At the start of every term, a small group of us ESL teachers meet to discuss the essays that new students had written as part of the placement process. Although one of the readers would occasionally say something like, “That’s a funny example” or “This writer made a good point there,” most of the time our comments were more like, “This writer is controlling her verb tense well,” “He connected those two ideas clearly,” “I noticed a breakdown with an independent clause when he tried to explain his support for that idea.”

Interestingly, I realized that this way of looking at the world went beyond reading students’ papers. My neighbor who is not a teacher and I were talking about novels. He asked me how I choose ones to read.  I said that I really didn’t care about the plot. He looked incredulous and said, “You don’t care about the plot? What else is there.” When I explained that I’m more attracted to good style, character development and description, he looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

Just as my musician friend, my horse-loving wife and uncle the farmer can’t help but see the world in a special way, teachers can’t stop themselves from seeing words differently from others.

David Kehe
Faculty Emeritus