I am desperately trying to determine a way to spend less time grading essays. I average 10-40 minutes per paper (really bad ones take even longer). I can’t help but ask myself if I’m trying too hard.
Donald Murray says, “I gave my students their papers, unmarked, and said, make them better.” Seriously? I can imagine that, for some students, this is a strategy that would work great. But I have far more students who (I feel) need more guidance.
One grading expert says “don’t comment so much; let them take responsibility for finding the solution to the (fill in the problem here),” while another says “leave more concrete comments; tell them exactly how to fix (fill in the problem here).
So which is it? Comment more, comment less, or don’t comment at all? If students are saying, “I wish he would listen better to what we need to know,” then how do I go about doing that? It just seems unrealistic to me when I am dealing with 22-44 students at a time.
So, I come back to the question, “Are we trying too hard?” Composition theorists have great intentions. They want to find that perfect way to teach composition. But the student population is so diverse and shouldn’t we be finding a way to reach all of those different levels of students as possible? It seems to me that locking into one mode of teaching composition will ultimately lock out many students from the joys of writing.
I was just listening to a podcast where they were discussing the same things about assigned reading and “great books” in secondary schools. The argument was that often, students don’t appreciate the “great works” (they mentioned Shakespeare, The Old Man and the Sea, Moby Dick) in junior high or high school, and end up thinking they don’t like books in general or thinking they dislike reading. The podcasters were suggesting that assigning books students dislike will kill their love of reading before it has a chance to root, and ultimately, people will end up avoiding literature that they might otherwise appreciate later in life.
It would pain me to think of any efforts as “trying too hard,” but perhaps your efforts are counterproductive (is that a better word?). Is it an issue of making comments on papers, or understanding the papers enough to be able to make comments?
In either case, I’ve always advocated the “priority system” when it comes to commenting — a student may have terrible grammar, but if they also lack a coherent thesis, the grammar issue is secondary. In that case, I end up commenting about the thesis and not mentioning (or summarily mentioning) grammar. Because, after all, if the student has no thesis, it’s not a passing paper, even if the grammar is perfect.
Put a different way, let’s say I spend a bunch of time making comments about grammar, and then the student ends up taking a lot of time to fix the grammar. Chances are that if the thesis needs work, much of the paper will be rewritten anyway, so the sentences that are grammatically incorrect in one draft may not be present in a future draft. Perhaps they’ll be replaced with different grammatical errors (or the same errors in different sentences), but chances are that the student won’t go back and figure out grammar errors on a draft they’re no longer working with in order to apply that knowledge to a new draft (oh how I wish it worked that way…)
Perhaps a priority system might help…?