Papers

End of the third quarter. I graded 33 College Comp II reaction essays in a blinding heat. Then I graded 18 College Comp braided essays. I just finished correcting another 18 College Comp essay tests.

Whhhheeeeewwww.

I’m beat.

And I still have 33 braided essays to grade by Tuesday for my College Comp II class.

Three of us English teachers were visiting about the workload that grading papers entails.

Let me preface my following comments with this - in no way do I mean to imply that other teachers do less work than English teachers.

Band and choir and theater teachers rehearse late into the night and on weekends. History teachers cover more territory than I ever could. Math, well, I won’t go there. I could never ever do what they do.

Each discipline has their workload.

It’s just that our discipline includes the papers.

It’s not that I dislike them. That’s not the case at all.

In fact, most of my braided essays were quite excellent and interesting.

It just takes a lot out of a teacher to read all those and wrestle with the thoughts the student has put down on paper and to try to make them better.

And it doesn’t help that for each essay my classes have done so far, I’ve had them do (usually) three different essays. For their braided essays, I had them write an explanation essay, a personal narrative essay, and an analytical essay. I read and responded to each of those. Then I tried to help them weave or braid them together.

Then they turned in the final product, and I read it.

The total essays I read for that one paper - 132. Even if I spent just five minutes on those drafts, that totals 11 hours (if my math is correct. And it may very well not be).

I know the research and everything screams to have students peer edit, but the fact still remains that no matter how hard I try, students are still in that stage where they might read something and correct blatant typos, usage errors, and formatting issues, but they still return it with the whopping feedback of “I liked it” or “it’s good.”

Not exactly helpful.

So I’m a bit possessive when it comes to reading through my students’ drafts.

But when the writing comes together and has that wow factor, those 11 hours are worth it.