I don’t know how you guys do it. I just finished about 5 hours of straight grading and my brain is complete oatmeal.
The sad thing is that there a good number of decent essays. Those are no trouble at all, except for the time it takes to go through them and make encouraging noises in the right places and reinforce the dangers of possible trouble spots in others.
Even the god-awful ones are at least amusing – and for those, it’s generally the same comments: Get a thesis, dictionary, clue, not necessarily in that order.
It’s the mediocre ones that are so difficult and time-consuming. I’ve been told that I mark papers up way too much and that no one ever reads the comments, but I really feel awful if I can’t at least give them the opportunity to understand how I think they could write a better paper. Of course, that means you’ve got to get knee-deep in the paper and try to tease out what the student was trying to say. Then you’ve got to personalize some suggestions tied to their unique problems. It takes forever. I know that they’ll probably never read the comments, but at least I feel better about it.
So, I’ve done a bit of work, and I’ve got some readings to take care of for tomorrow, but I think they can wait for awhile while I go wandering. There’s a lot to be said for aimless wandering…
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5 comments:
I feel for you. The closest I get these days is when I'm given technical papers to peer-review. But there I can presume that the authors are credentialled to some extent already, and that gives me a cleaner conscience, pedagogically. I can just take a few minutes of groaning and scribbling for each mediocre or bad manuscript: just enough to know whether to say, "Reject" or "Revise and resubmit".
I don't much miss the days of grading essay exams, though.
You are so right. The handful of terrific papers are a joy to read, and the really bad ones are easy to grade because there's so much obvious to write on them. But the mediocre papers .... ugh. How do you say tactfully THIS IS JUST BORING? or .... I WISH YOU'D GET TO YOUR POINT! or ... PLEASE GIVE SOME DETAILS, ANY KIND OF DETAILS, INSTEAD OF ALL THESE ABSTRACTIONS or .... I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE SAYING HERE!
I end up reading these papers over and over again, trying to come up with what the heck the writer was saying and how I can help him say it. Ugh.
This is SO true. I have the hardest time commenting on B papers. The A ones are great, and it's easy to point out what works about them. Cs and Ds are weak enough it's easy to suggest where they should be improved. But Bs? They're just... good. Nothing wrong with them enough to correct, nothing great enough about them to praise. In fact the only reason I know they're Bs is that they pale in comparison to the As. But that's hard to explain to the student who got the B... it's not that yours had anything wrong with it; it's just that it was possible to do the assignment better!
at least you care...swak!
I had a sister reunion over the weekend, and BabySis was still grading her Comp 1 classes from this trimester. She'd say things like, "Gah, this one is going to be bad," and skip it to grade the next in line. Then she'd go back to the offending offering and say, "Gah, it's still bad!" She was having sooo much fun with those argumentative essays.
She had no choice tho, b/c trimester grades were due in by noon PDT yesterday.
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