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I want to start with some distinctions about the evaluations made of a remedial student's paper. (1) An experienced teacher probably has a hundred or more responses to a two-page remedial paper, silent responses made instantly to errors, ideas, shapes of sentences, handwriting, and so on. By mid-term he has double responses to each of those things, as he is aware, with each, of progress or lack of it. The silent evaluations as the teacher makes his way through the paper are like flashes of hundreds of little bulbs going off one after another, each with its own meaning, and of course most of those responses and the reasons for them remain locked in the teacher's mind. The student never hears about them. Curiously, I sometimes find myself thinking, as I watch a student re-read the paper I have just returned, he must be catching more than a glimpse of how I responded to everything I didn't mark, a hilarious illusion. And I may be wrong in assuming some other teachers share it occasionally. (2) The markings and comments a teacher does put on a paper, even the simplest, have complex meanings for the teacher, meanings which again remain locked in his head. A teacher who reads, in the middle of a paper, Things you do regularly, your personality should be the same and not fake to try impressing other, can quickly inscribe a question mark in the margin, or write Frag, or Is something off here? but it would take a long time to explain exactly, and completely, the thoughts-the systems of measuring, of judging-behind those notations. A teacher writes Awk, but the meaning, for the particular occasion, stays in his mind. (3) As a student evaluates his paper and my comments, what do my comments mean to him? My guess is that to the remedial student, any traditional comments mean so little as to render my having bothered to make them a farce. Suppose, as I read the sentence, We'll naturlly your'll act different in each place, but you can still be yourself in each Place, I decide to restrain