The plan for this weekend was to get caught up on grading essays. As any secondary teacher will tell you, grading essays is a daunting task. So, it wasn't too surprising that I had been putting it off for weeks. Even this morning, when I knew there was no more time to waste and that it had to be done before my students finished their current essay, I found myself distracting myself with other tasks: doing laundry, chauffeuring my son around, and catching up on reading and commenting on Slices.
Finally, I convinced myself I simply couldn't put it off any longer. I grabbed my book bag and went upstairs to grade. My students' essays were all on the computer, but I had printed out copies of the rubric to grade each one and hand back. I had already graded a few, but not enough to put much of a dent in the stack of 131. This was going to take awhile. A long while.
Except, I made a discovery when I pulled out my stack of papers. There were only 33 of them. How could that be? I was sure I had put all of them in my bag. Yet, here was irrefutable evidence that I had not as I only had the ones for my 2nd period class. Only then did my mind flash on the stack of papers piled on top of the mini-fridge next to my desk at work.
Oops.
Looks like I won't be spending my weekend grading essays after all.
I asked a teacher who was retiring a few years ago what had most influenced her decision to retire, and she said weekend grading. Good for your subconscious for refusing to grab those extra 100 essays. 33 is plenty for this weekend.
ReplyDeleteThank you! The amount of time spent grading is crazy!
ReplyDeleteSounds fortuitous to me! I have a big set of essays coming in this week and am NOT looking forward to all the extra grading time I'm going to need to score them... (Or to the fact that I'm "scoring" rather than giving feedback!)
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean. It is so hard to give meaningful feedback when there are so many. It was a lot easier when I taught 3rd grade and only had 20 or so to read (and they were much shorter!). A couple of weeks ago I did read through the essays as they were in progress and commented on all of them. I much prefer to work with students to improve their writing than to actually assign it a grade.
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