Addendum

As I sit here frantically Googling to put off grading my last two (2) papers, I found an addendum to my previous post:

Debby Thompson’s humor article on the stages of grading.

Ironic and enlightening.

Grading: The Numbers

I have sixty-five students this semester (ten fewer than last semester, woot!). When they each write five-page research papers, this is what that means for my week.

Sixty five (65) times five (5) is three hundred twenty five (325). That’s the equivalent of a longish novel’s worth of freshman English papers. And some, perhaps twenty percent (20%), are zealous enough to write a sixth page. So call that fifteen (15) extra pages for a total of three hundred forty (340).

But wait, they all have Works Cited pages that aren’t included in their page count. So add another page each. That’s four hundred five pages (405) to read and assess in a week.

Now, suppose I follow the advice of my graduate school professor and spend no more than five (5) minutes grading an assignment. That’s sixty-five papers at five minutes each, totaling three hundred twenty five minutes, or about five and a half (5.5) hours. On the other hand, that means I spend less than one (1) minute reading each page in order to give myself time to write a paragraph of response and mark a rubric for each paper. Fair to the student? I suppose not.

So let’s say that I spend four minutes reading and assessing the paper, one minute marking a rubric, and two minutes writing a paragraph of response. That’s an efficient seven (7) minutes per paper, at seven and a half (7.5) hours total.

This adds up. I typically grade in six batches of eight to ten, because that’s how many I can do in an hour or so. And I can’t grade much longer than an hour without beginning to a) hate myself, b) hate my students, c) notice hatred coming out in grades I assign, or d) getting a headache.

On weeks that I have grading, I work about eight (8) hours more than other weeks. Since I only get paid for the nine (9) hours a week that I physically stand in front of the classroom, grading weeks mean that I earn money for just over half (50%) of my work. Disregarding, of course, the other out-of-class work like lesson planning that also takes a couple of hours a week.

Are these numbers depressing? Yes.

Solution: Read faster. Write shorter responses. Look for another job.

Check, check, and check.

Briefly

I am here.

Today I am working at my SAT prep job. I will be talking, generally nonstop, between 9:15-11:15, eating a snack, talking between 11:45-1:45, eating a late lunch of Panera Bread, and talking yet again between 2:45-4:45.

When I get home, I will be watching my favorite foreign film, Bella Martha (translated asMostly Martha, about a chef), having my homemade Italian sausage soup for dinner, and reading the gloriously pessimistic K. J. Parker. There is a volcano. You can imagine what will happen.

And tomorrow I work from home–writing as many weeks of lesson plans as I can stomach, as well as my students’ assignment sheet for their second essay. Essay must be five pages. Five full pages. Not because I want to read what will amount to nearly 400 pages of student writing when they turn them in, but because that page length required by the college.

I am underpaid.

Non Sequitur

I set my students to writing exaggerated logical fallacies so they would learn how to identify and avoid them. In my lecture, I mentioned a logical fallacy I overheard someone say in the parking lot of my apartment, making a kind of joke about the situation.

Apparently this anecdote inspired one of my students.

Non Sequitur: Our professor is such a good teacher; it’s hard to believe she is an apartment dweller.

On Plagiarism

I delivered my MLA lecture this morning. It turned out unexpectedly hilarious.

The whole point of documenting your sources, using MLA or APA or some other documentation style, is to avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism is, of course, passing off someone else’s words or ideas as your own.

You see, there are two kinds of plagiarism. There’s doing it on purpose to make yourself sound smarter, to cut corners, to avoid working, etc. And then there’s doing it because you don’t know how to cite sources properly. Which is what I told my students.

Only I expressed it like this:

“There’s no getting around it: you have to know MLA style. It doesn’t matter if you plagiarize because you’re trying to get away with something or because you’re too dumb to know better. It’s still an academic crime and I’m still going to report you.”

That’s a quality education my students are getting, folks.

Lesson “plans”

1. On Lesson Plans. As a student, I always hated learning from PowerPoint presentations. As a teacher, I have learned to love teaching from PowerPoint presentations. I’ve just finished writing the world’s most boring presentation on MLA format. Yes, it does boil down to telling my students to figure it out for themselves on the Purdue OWL.

2. Not That It Will Do Any Good. Considering that I have been asked by students what a narrative was after teaching them about that concept for no fewer than three weeks, I don’t have high hopes that trusting my students to teach themselves where to place the commas will have positive results. I direct you to one of my new favorite sites, S**t My Students Write. (Despite temptation, I have never and will never submit here.)

3. Super Bowl Party. My husband and I are going to our Sunday school’s Super Bowl party tonight. I learned from Cake Wrecks that the “Gaints” are playing, but I had to ask to find out that their competitors were the Patriots. At least I know that the sport in question is football.

4. Party = Food. There will be a ton (2,000 lbs.) of food at the party tonight, where I will be resolutely exercising my self-control in order not to eat any sweets. The good news is that my resolution does not extend to ribs or chips and dip. The bad news is that my resolution does not extend to ribs or chips and dip.

5. Look! A Fifth Point. I usually stop at four for some reason. Not today.

It averaged out

1. Downs. Here’s a message to all of my high school students’ parents: buy your children the textbook for my class! It’s the third week of the semester. This cannot go on. Because I plan to start taking it out of their grades, and it’ll be your fault.

2. Ups. I finished reading the third and last Rennie Airth book, The Dead of Winter. It was pretty good, though not quite as good as book one. I appear to like books set in wartime London.

3. Some More Downs. I tried to make myself a sandwich for dinner: turkey and Gouda cheese on toasted bread with sliced cucumber and avocado. But the turkey and cucumber were expired and squishy, respectively, and the avocado wasn’t yet ripe. Which I discovered after I toasted the bread and sliced the fruit, so I threw away the lot.

4. Nevertheless, Ups. So my husband took me to Jimmy John’s, where I ordered a #12 beach club, which contains turkey, cheese, cucumber, lettuce, sprouts, mustard, and avocado spread on fresh bread. So I ate a better version (excepting the Gouda) of the sandwich I failed to make.