Thursday, September 5, 2013

Grading.

I got ten papers graded in about two and a half hours (took a couple of short breaks).

It's not the reading through the paper that takes so long, nor yet marking the errors (checkmarks in the right margin, one per grammar/punctuation mistake).  Nope, it's writing comments on what they're doing right, and what they need to fix to do better on what they're doing wrong.

And, after four years of doing that on electronic documents, doing that longhand hurts.

4 comments:

  1. I hated grading papers. I had up to 48 5th graders at a time although the legal max was 36. They can generate a hell of a lot of paper over the course of one day.

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    1. I love teaching. I teach for free; the university pays me to grade the papers. That's the part that sucks.

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  2. I hate writing much more than a check long hand. My handwriting wasn't very good to start with. Learning to write in cursive Cyrillic made Palmer Method English go away, and now that my hands are stiff and sore most of the time, writing a letter hurts quite a bit. Luckily, I can still type.

    I know what you mean about 'I do X for free, but I get paid to do Y". There are certain parts of my job that I would gladly do for a lot less money, but some that if that were everything I could do, I would demand a lot more money.

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    1. The most I've written longhand in the past five years is a page or so to get me started on a stuck story. Grading sucks, because those quarter to half page notes at the end explaining everything...really add up when you figure that amount times ten or so papers in two hours.

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