Grading on a Curveball

Back when I taught Composition and Rhetoric at WVU, I thought 44 papers was a lot to grade every four weeks. Oh how I moaned and complained about those freshman monstrosities. How totally unfair it was for me to have to grade these papers while teaching TWO whole classes.

Then I started student teaching in a public high school, and I realize just what a slackass I truly was.

With 150 students, my grading time has nearly quadrupled. Granted, high school students don't write nearly as many four-page papers, but what they lack in page length they more than make up for in sheer volume. I did have to grade research papers last month that were each five pages in length, and that took some SERIOUS time. Right now, I have 150 study guides, 150 sets of homework questions, and 150 essay tests to grade. This doesn't even include the 150 writing journals that I should be checking every two weeks.

There are, I've learned, some tricks to reduce grading. First, I can always assign a more creative project that's a bit more enjoyable to read than the traditional prompt. For instance, I also have a stack of storybook projects to grade, wherein each student chose one story from The Odyssey to recreate as a children's storybook. Thus far, quite a few of these projects are really impressive and fun to read. In one story, Odysseus's crew consists of gingerbread men (because the Cyclops in the story eats Odysseus's men) and they put the Cyclops to sleep with "the finest warm milk in all of gingerbread-town" (instead of getting him drunk on ye olde wine). Stuff like that is a treat to grade and really leads me to believe that younger generations show legitimate creativity and intelligence.

Second, and less nobly, I can "grade for completion." The student gets full credit if he or she simply finished the assignment... no matter how much of a steaming pile the product may be in terms of quality. I may pull this stunt on the pile of homework questions.

Finally, I can always find refuge in bureaucracy by grading according to the PSSA Scoring Guide for Writing Assessment. Under these guidelines, I assign a paper a raw score based solely on five areas: Focus, Content, Organization, Style, and Conventions. Now, my mentor teacher uses these five fields anyway, but she tends to comment on the papers as well. But if I'm looking to cut corners in an efficient way, a simple and completely worthless number at the top of the paper is the way to go.

It's hard not to get completely overwhelmed by grading when the stacks of papers lay on your desk. Despair creeps in. Resentment begins to rear its ugly head. Before too long, one can begin to harbor disturbing fantasies of lighting the papers on fire and dancing nude in the ashes. I've refrained from drinking while grading, despite how stress-relieving that sounds. I don't need to wake up the next day to find that I've scrawled "YouR paper iz reely pretty! The adjectivs make U look soo hottt!!"

I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but I'm a lot more forgiving of errors near the end of a stack of papers because I get tired of writing the same comments over and over again. I sit there and think, "Damn! I don't want to explain why his paragraph structure isn't right. Fuck it!" This is not the attitude of the world's greatest teacher, but these are certainly the thoughts of an overworked human being with five classes of honors students whose helicopter parents would leap on me if I knocked their grades down unfairly.

English teachers catch a lot of shit because their grading is subjective. Well, generally speaking, it's good that it is. Would you really want your paper, creative and thoughtful that it is, graded according to rigid and unwavering criteria? That's why the state standardized tests are so roundly criticized. Subjective grading allows teachers to use their experience and judgment to assess style, substance, creativity, and individual student improvement until Skynet develops sentience and can create cyborgs to do this. On the downside, subjective grading does leave the student's paper at the mercy of human frailty and weakness. I try my damnedest not to take my frustrations and exhaustion out on my students' work, but dammit, it's hard sometimes.

Maybe I could just beat them instead. That could be cathartic.

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"What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."