When a student came to me, this is not to belittle him, but this is the truth at the time. At the time, I was a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Engineering at my university, which I did not like at first, but which eventually became my home. Back to the beginning. This student had gotten the lowest grade possible. I don’t remember now exactly what that grade was, but I remember when he came to me and left after getting the final grade on his midterm exams. This incident occurred because the corrector at that time did not want to waste time literally interpreting the hieroglyphs that the student had left on a white sheet of paper, which would require Champollion, not a teaching assistant, who had more than a hundred sheets of paper to finish correcting them.

That student stood up to answer my explanations and inquiries at the same time. Every question I asked and every word I wanted the meaning of, I found after a while appearing in front of me as if it had literally appeared out of nowhere, and I did not even want to keep that paper because I realized how imprudent and hasty I was in reading. If you knew, it would have been very difficult. But when he came to me and he knew exactly what had happened, as if he had been with me during the correction, he performed every procedure as if he had been waiting for it. He was not alarmed by the grade he had obtained, as if it was not the first time it had happened to him. At that time, I felt tension that I was not accustomed to, and I thought what would happen if that student did not come and explain his writing. Or what would happen if there was no circumstance for me to go to university that day. What would happen if I insisted on my opinion and did not agree to review the paper, but wanted to apologise? Because I summarized the entire batch in the few actions I met from some of them.

What remains with me of the situation

I learned that reviewing marking is part of the responsibility of teaching. Difficulty reading the answer does not mean a lack of understanding, and providing the student with an opportunity to explain what was written may reveal an error that would have remained without the review.