For a long time, my house has been consumed by student essays. At first I was the only one bringing them home. On Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, I pulled out an old red canvas bag full of books, folders and student papers, and made stacks on the kitchen table or the living room floor, and started reading. Often I got them out at 9 or 10 o’clock on weeknights, too.

The self-imposed arrangement was that I would not let the students wait longer than one week to get their essays back. By and large I kept the deadline. Sometimes I beat it, if I had extra time at the desk in my office.

A few years later, my wife, Bonnie, started teaching college composition, too, and in between caring for children, we sat in our chairs reading essays. Mind you, when I say “reading” I do not mean comfortably soaking in a nice story or a sketchy but cute idea. I mean an aggressive act of trying to understand what is going on here (easier sometimes than others), bringing into mental focus different patterns of strengths, weaknesses and errors in organization and language, sorting them out, deciding which ones need attention, and finally, devising a way of talking about them which is not discouraging. To do this effectively, you have to know each student, which can be tough going.

At that time I was teaching three or four classes a semester. Each class had about 22 students, so every assignment I had 60 to 70 essays to “read.” A diligent journeyman English teacher takes an average of about 15 to 20 minutes to read one essay. You can reach a point of efficiency where reading and commenting take about 10 to 12 minutes. For a novice, one essay can take half an hour and more. That’s if you’re doing the best you can. It is, of course, possible to skim an essay, delete a few stray commas, underline a couple of subject-verb errors, and scribble a letter grade in five minutes. And get away with it. It does almost nothing for the students, though.

So being intent on actually teaching, I had 20-plus hours of reading ahead of me every time I collected essays.

This went on at our house for years, through bouts with graduate school and into a small, intense American university in Eastern Europe, where I became a program chair and Bonnie directed the writing center, on top of reading essays. Busy, we were. But here’s the punch line: We had no idea what Bonnie was in for.

After we returned from Europe, she got a job teaching high school English. (I looked into this, too, but learned from the Maine Department of Education (for a $50 fee) that, although I held master’s and doctoral degrees in English and had taught for more than 10 years, I still needed seven undergraduate education courses and a semester of student teaching to be certified to teach. I declined to pursue it.) In high school, Bonnie had not 60, but in most years more than 100 student writings per assignment. The Saturday, Sunday and weeknight “reading” about tripled for her. And the identifying and sorting of problems was even more complicated because the range of abilities varied so widely.

In her first couple of years, she also spent uncounted hours just designing courses: mapping out readings, lectures, class activities, devising assignments that work. And the daily chores that never diminish: reading and rereading textbooks; revamping assignments; outlining each day’s points; thinking over what to repeat from yesterday; anticipating confusion. And in high school, atop these time-consuming activities and truckloads of administrative paperwork, she had problems that frequently eclipse all else: how to keep the classroom quiet enough to accomplish something and how to deal constructively with the volcanic emotions of teenagers. Some of her stories will make your hair stand on end. Maybe the DOE was right to prevent me from teaching high school, I don’t know.

Our house is still consumed by student essays, although they are all Bonnie’s now. After Europe, I taught scaled-down course loads, went to China as a Fulbright scholar, home-schooled our son and later taught online courses, then eventually felt constrained for various reasons to drop out. Now it’s her Saturdays and Sundays that are occupied with essays. By February vacation every year, she is physically and emotionally exhausted, but plugs on.

This is just a sketch of one teaching household, a few lines really, to suggest some of teaching’s components – personal, professional and cultural. But there’s a great deal more to be said, and the intent is to come back about once a month and try to clarify what this – education – is all about. Stay tuned.

Dana Wilde, a former English professor, U.S. Fulbright scholar and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, holds a doctorate in English and now works as a copy desk editor and columnist for the BDN.