Pain Management: Grading: Part I
A few months back I asked people to take the one question Teacher Annoyance Survey. The purpose was to see which of the three unavoidable annoyances of teaching is most bothersome to most of you. The vote was split almost exactly into thirds between 1) Tedium and Predictability, 2) Bell and Chain, and 3) No Career Path.
Here is part one of Tedium: Grading.
However one deals with the daily homework side of grading, there still await the tests, quizzes, projects and papers. Little might hope to be worse than your very own stack of 85 English papers or Algebra II final exams to grade. There will never be a good time to do this. They will sit in a pile and taunt you until you give in. They can wait, but they will not be denied. It is simply the way of things.
There are two basic ways to approach the grading of a giant stack of essays or exams. The first is to start in on them right away. Just dig in; knocking them out a few at a time whenever you have a few minutes. It starts immediately, while your class is still taking the test. As soon as the first kid is done, you grade his test. You will be able to get at least a handful of them graded before everybody is even finished taking it. It’s a small dent that can be psychologically empowering.
Awesome!
Though it sounds reasonable, and every graded exam is a good exam, there is a significant downside to this approach. The time a teacher spends in class when his attention is not necessarily divided among multiple separate items of immediate, mild annoyance is precious. Students’ sitting quietly taking a test is a sacred time for the teacher. Now there is a brief window of time when I might sit down and let my brain do as it pleases. Normally this would be out of the question.
I’m tired. It is quiet and I breathe. But this moment of blissful stillness prematurely evaporates into anxiety because I know that at some point in the next two minutes there will be a question. The question usually comes within the first 45 seconds and it is usually stupid. I will, however, pretend the question is not stupid. This effort will further sap my strength and remind me of the intellectual wreckage I will face in the stack of completed exams. A shiver runs down my spine.
But I have trained for this. I am ready.
Moments after the initial vacuous query, logged at 1 minute 5 seconds, somebody will need to borrow a pen or spill something. I will confiscate a cell phone. It will be a much nicer phone than my own. Somebody else will need to use the bathroom. This can always be counted upon. Perhaps an error will be discovered rendering question number 3 unintelligible. I accept responsibility for this. In addition to being written on the board, the proper wording will have to be repeated many, many times over.
Maybe the top of the test indicates that today’s date is the 9th when in fact it is the 10th. Hands will go up immediately because students eat teachers’ mistakes like my dog eats cat shit. In four minutes, another student will rediscover the same mistake and ask about it. Perhaps page 2 is mysteriously missing from one-third of the exams, but, somehow, nobody will notice this.
A small group of students will insist that we didn’t cover any of the material on page 4. Yes, we did. Three students come in 7 minutes late. Two more arrive after 11 minutes. They will all be shocked to discover there is a test. They will need to be calmed and seated. Another student produces a note showing that she must leave in 10 minutes for a doctor’s appointment. She will not have time to finish the test, but has already seen the whole thing. A fourth student arrives 27 minutes late. He is clearly supposed to have a pass or a note, but does not. I am clearly supposed to send him to the office, but I do not. This decision comes easily because a trip to the office for him will create more work for me. Who needs that? Just sit down. Though it probably doesn’t matter, he won’t be able to finish the exam before the period ends. He will start it now and finish after school. But he won’t come after school. We both know this and we have tacitly agreed not to mention it. Ever.
Smarty and Dummy both finish their exams very early; at the same time, but for completely different reasons. My plan was to begin grading these right away. But I haven’t stopped answering questions and running around since my period of serenity began. And besides, there are two students in the back who I should really go wake up. The plan is not going according to plan, but I can still grade a few at lunch and right after school. A few on the train home. A few before dinner while I wait for the oven to heat up or the water to boil. After my kids go to bed.
This piecemeal, any-spare-second-I-get approach worked only occasionally for me. I didn’t like it because I needed those breaks of 5 and 10 minutes throughout the day to decompress and think about something else; to put my head on my desk and imagine I am really an astronaut or a dolphin trainer. I need to talk to a friend down the hall or put on some music. Go out for a smoke when I used to smoke. I started smoking out of necessity in my second year as a teacher. The true miracle is that I quit three years later while I was still a teacher. When you judge someone you see smoking, just remember that she might be a teacher. The smoke filling her lungs and the sweet, sweet nicotine traveling through her bloodstream to the pleasure centers of her brain might be the only thing keeping her off the evening news tonight.
The jab-and-retreat approach also requires one to continually return to the pain and literally carry it around with you all the time. It’s the Vietnam strategy; except it actually does work if done properly.
The second approach is the blitzkrieg. I used this more often and with greater success. This is the no fucking around method of precision planning and overwhelming force. You take it all down in, at most, three frontal assaults. You plan this out and prepare. It’s just you and your stack. You go to a coffee shop on a Saturday. (DO NOT go to a bar.) Get a table in the back, away from windows. Or sit at a big table in your house or apartment when you know you’ll be alone for at least three hours. Getting out of the house is highly recommended because you are more likely to be distracted at home. You spread out your piles and your pens and your sticky notes and whatever else you need. Turn off your phone. Don’t even bring your laptop. You spend time psyching yourself up and preparing to enter the battlefield. You’ve had a good night’s sleep. You’re talking trash; cursing and threatening the stack. It knows you’re serious because you’ve fucked your whole Saturday in the ass for this. Don’t turn your back on it. Look it in the eye and show no fear.
Let’s do it.
To be continued…
Mr. Teachbad
Brilliant! You’ve captured it exactly.
I’d say more, but I have this stack of 47 Chemistry tests staring me in the face.
Are you sure I can’t go to the bar?
Having just finished my first stack of 75 quizzes, I have to admit that I am a huge fan of the blitzkrieg approach. I prefer to grade with some heavy, death or speed metal playing at obscene decibals. Hopefully loud enough to cause the custodians to run to my room to see if everything is okay. I do admit that I return to school to grade at night, simply for the fact of having no computer or internet at home. Teachbad, You did forgot to mention the “helpful” administrator who comes in during the test time to observe the class. Which causes the kids to freak out further. And me to wish that I had better “lesson planned” for a test day.
I like the ninja style “Grade it while the class is testing.” If I plan ahead enough I can do this with speed and efficiency.This works really well with my morning classes when some of them are still too sleepy to fully realize they are testing and the rest are actually focusing. But now my district wants a gazillion rubrics instead of just 1 and now we have meetings on our planning period. The Saturday plan doesn’t work for me- but then the reality of Sunday about 4 pm I start to realize its all over and I must get myself together.
I just don’t understand – why am I grading when nobody gives a rip. The district overrides the grades and passes every kid anyway. The kids don’t care what they know, they only care what the “grade” is. The parents certainly don’t notice that their child is functionally illiterate and yet has a 4.0 in every English course ever taken. I say cut the grading, give ‘em all a C except for those 2 kids you noticed who actually know shit. Give them an A. Kids with pushy parents, look at what the kid got last year, and give them half a grade more.
Oh yeah,then keep the tests to reduce cheating.
Here’s my method for cutting corners on the grading of high school math tests:
1) Every other test was exclusively multiple-choice questions and was marked by a Scantron machine.
2) The tests that were non-multiple-choice consisted of twenty-five examples or problems worth five points each. Students had to answer any twenty. If they answered more, it was “extra credit” each time a final answer was correct.
3) I never looked at any of the work. (There wasn’t all that much, anyway, as the students used calculators.) I marked the final answers as either right (5 points) or wrong (0 points).
4) I never gave any essay questions. (Most of the students wrote incoherently.)
5) Whatever the mark was on the non-multiple-choice test, I treated it as a raw score, and then multiplied it by 1.4 to take into account that I never gave any part credit. (That had the effect of making each correct answer worth 7 points, rather than 5 points.)
6) I always marked the non-multiple-choice tests at home while watching TV. This took the tedium out of comparing answer grids against an answer key and writing checks or X’s and scores on the individual papers.
After you blast through all your tests, you’ll have one legitimate A, four B’s, seven C’s, thirty- nine D’s (most of whom cheated off each other) and twenty- six F’s. Now you get to do your curve.
…..and you know will earn each grade without even looking at their answers!
Nothing makes you feel like slogging onward through that stack like writing “46%” on top of page after page.
I really enjoyed this column because it reminded me (once again) why I am so happy NOT to be a teacher anymore…of course grading was just one aspect of it, and the reason I left the field was certainly more complex than just not wanting to grade any more papers, but truth be told, the tedium aspect was driving me up the wall. (I’d say the “no career path” aspect was probably my #1 reason for leaving, but tedium ran a close second, especially if included in tedium is teaching the same thing over and over and over again, class after class, year after year. True, no two classes are the same and you do things a bit differently each time and yadayadayada, but at the end of the day, looking back…I was teaching the same shit over and over again and getting more or less the same shit in return for my trouble…sweet, earnest kids who usually didn’t do any real work in my class.)
I will be happy if I never grade another paper again in my life…or have to call another parent…
I’m looking to leave too. Would you care to share what you left to do?
captured to perfection. simply, on-point perfection.
Strangely, none of the above is the worst for me. Instead, it’s the term “professional.”
Somebody discovered that people will do incredible things,put up with any number of indignities, and even agree to do things not in their best interests if you simply call them a professional.
Thus: You can accept ridiculous work hours, without any additional compensation, because you’re a professional. You can put up with abuse from parents and not retaliate because you’re a professional. You can put up with abuse from KIDS who should be in juvie or a locked psychiatric ward because…………
Nothing good ever came after the phrase,”You’re a professional, so you………………….”
As an elementary music teacher, I don’t do a lot of written work. There’s some, but not a whole lot. The vast majority of my grading is performance based – for example, hearing 75 3rd graders struggle through Hot Cross Buns on recorder. One at a time. I hate that fucking song.
BUT this year the state DOE, in all of its infinite wisdom, has decided that all special area teachers need to give a state-mandated multiple choice test in their subject, four times during the year (so they can measure growth, of course). How else will they know if we’re good teachers if we don’t have a state test, after all? So on top of concerts and choral festivals and ordering recorders and performance field trips and everything else musical, I get to look forward to grading 1,800 (450 kids x 4 tests) multiple choice tests. How, exactly, do you give a multiple choice test in music to a Kindergartner? The DOE doesn’t know, because even though we are supposed to be rolling this out this school year they still have yet to give us the tests. Awesome.
You have ABCD on your musical scale – can you do multiple choice by sound answer?
(Sorry, I do believe that the musically talented should never have to “teach” elementary music. Unless they’re deaf.)
(Sorry, I do believe that the musically talented should never have to “teach” elementary music. Unless they’re deaf.)
I totally agree, this is a lesson I learned the hard way!
As for the multiple choice by sound answer, I have no idea what these tests will be. There are some “experts” at down at DOE who are creating them. Every teacher in the state will be given the same tests.
Music teachers from across the state had the chance to be part of the committee that created them. One of my colleages made the trip down to DOE several times to be our district representative into it. They made up a series of performance tests for the different grades. Long story short, at the end of the several months long process the educational consultant rejected their proposal because “performance based tests will be too hard to grade uniformly.” So it will be a paper and pencil test created by the consulting company.
These two statements are priceless, with the second forcing me to laugh aloud with no around to hear either…
“I will confiscate a cell phone. It will be a much nicer phone than my own.”
“I needed those breaks of 5 and 10 minutes throughout the day to decompress and think about something else; to put my head on my desk and imagine I am really an astronaut or a dolphin trainer.”
As for the topic, it doesn’t surprise me it was a three way split for the most part. It’s all true and it’s all depressing.
Worse yet, there are other factors which do not even quite fall into those 3 categories. For example, I’ve always had 1 or 2 paras, but this year (I’m in a different school now as I escaped a monster of a principal at my other school) I have a mind-boggling 6 paras.
Anyway, I need to cut this post short as I seriously consider ripping my fucking face off…cause that’s how wonderful I feel about another new year.
Love this post.
Due to an error at my district, I got stuck at two schools I didn’t even choose. I am at one school 4 days and the other for 1. The four day school wants a Hugh commitment since I am in charge of the tech. I inherited a nightmare. The new school wants lesson coordinated with the teachers except I am never there to collaborate with anyone. Then, they want fantasy lesson plans for for my one day- basically a sub- while the other school wants reality plans after I teach. This is the tip of my horror in teaching. Also, the one day school seems like a two hour commute due to traffic. For y’alls entertainment!!!
I feel for you Teachbaby!
The only positive thing I can think of this year is that I decided 100% that I will not stay a teacher any longer. It’s not a matter of if, but when.
I’m at a point where I envy the custodians in my school and the simplicity of their job. So, every time I walk by one I wish I could change places.
It’s not what they do, it’s what they DON’T do (e.g. lessons plans, data reports, rubrics, checklists, differentiation, holding in pee, holding in doody, and so on.
Me, too. Today I decided that this would be my last year! I am already regretting going back for this year–I longed to quit last year, but I didn’t want to be “a quitter.” At this point, I am fully OK with being a quitter, a loser, lacking in commitment to the profesions–whatever you want to call me, I just want out.
I teach high school English. 160 students this year–it takes me the entire weekend just to get the grading done and entered, and then there is planning on top of that.
I just might be able to summon the dedication if the kids were interested, but it’s the same story this year as last year–30 kids in a class. On any given day 10 to 15% of them are absent, another 10 % are screwing around hijacking the learning of the others, talking while I’m attempting to teach, interrupting me with rude and idiotic demands. Meanwhile, the rest of the students are either sitting there wasted or asleep, or wearing resigned expressions as it dawns on them that this is yet another class period where they will fail to be able to concentrate or learn.
I taught private school in another state before I went public, and believe me, it was not like this. Poor behavior was just not tolerated, and I did not end the day, every day, exhausted and angry.
I do not know what I’ll do after this year, or even if I’ll make it through this year. But come this time next year, I will not be doing this.
Good for you CeeCee!!! Like you, I don’t know if I’ll even be able to make it through this year either. I wanted to quit before I even started the new year last week.
Also like you, I taught in a private school as well, but only for a year. That year was the most enjoyable year of my short 4-5 year teaching career.
I considered teaching in a private school as a possible alternative, but I’m just so sick of teaching in general I have a feeling I won’t be very happy anyhow. I want to work with adults only and not risk peeing myself waiting for my prep or lunch.
The private school pay could be an issue as well, although if I keep this nightmare up, it will be just a matter of time before I suddenly clutch my youthful 41 year-old chest and slam down, face first, to the pavement.
On a side note, FUCK RUBRICS!!!!!
great battle cry FUCK RUBRICKS!!!!
I know what CeeCee means about not wanting to be a quitter. I had the same thought process in the beginning, but then I made it past the five year mark and decided that enough is enough, life is too short to spend every day this exhausted, disrepsected, and frustrated. I’m almost done my public communication masters, and am actively looking for a job in my new field. I have no intention of finishing this school year (may the job hunting gods have mercy on me).
Good luck “Soon to be…”. The fact that you made it to the 5-year mark is a testament to your strong will. Imagine how nice it will feel when you put that strength into a job which does not drain you dryer than the Mojave Desert!!!
Hi to all who decided to quit on the first day: Dear Differientiate This: I feel like I’m stuck in this crap job. I am going to Find the time- ha ha- to look for work alternatives, but I am 6 years from retirement. I am in my tenth year and I am telling anyone young enough to Run for your Life. I was fit, healthy and trim when I began.. I am finally starting put pay attention to me first and teaching last. It sucks when you realize that you are ready to resign on the second day of school. It use to take me until May, then March, now Sept 12. Ten years and it’s supposed to be better but it feels worse. Fuck lesson plan, CSAP, grade books – when you waste hours because you are fforced to give every kid a C or B, bulletin boards, power points, calling worthless parents( logging this shit call too), rubrics, eyc. When you think about it, if we never saw one student EVER, this would still be a FULL time job. Best wishes for a great year guys!! Go Chicago Teachers!!!
Teachbaby,
Yes, being 6 years from retirement makes it VERY difficult to actually quit and do something else.
I’m looking to get out (and will eventually), but I do need to find something that makes some kind of sense too. Otherwise, I would have never even stepped foot into school for the new year.
I keep trying to psyche myself up knowing I am going to leave 100%. It just isn’t working very well. I still feel stressed and depressed every day knowing I’m going in once again the following morning.
I’m a Special Ed teacher and I asked a sub-para in my room the other day if she plans on becoming a teacher. She said no (as does practically every para as of late).
She used a word to describe teaching which I’ve yet to use throughout all my complaining (I never used to complain….how sad). She said “No way, the work is BRUTAL.” I have to say, she really hit the nail on that one. I think it is, to date, the most accurate word as of yet. (though I think COMPLICATED is also very accurate)
Anyway, teaching is B-R-U-T-A-L indeed.
Sorry for the typos above. I’ m not illiterate, my cell is a pain to use;)