Grading Success

Wednesdays are my busiest day of the week. Except for Saturdays and Sundays, and occasionally Mondays and Fridays. I guess I mean to say that my Tuesdays and Thursdays are slow days by comparison.

Wednesdays are my favorite days, though. On Wednesday mornings I teach a class for a local homeschool co-op. This glorious hour comes at 8:30 (IN THE MORNING!) but it’s my favorite hour of my favorite day of the week. For one hour, I absolutely love my life and what I am doing.

Then I leave the classroom and grade papers. I hate grading papers. I suspect that this is the balance that keeps me from idolizing the role of the teacher too much. Yes, the best hour of my week is spent teaching, but it’s followed by an agonizing two hours of trying to decide how picky to be over what a student submits.

There are several aspects that come into play with grading papers. And for me, worrisome amounts of self-discovery have resulted from grading the assignments of students.

First of all, I am by nature a very blunt, black and white person in writing. When I speak, I am usually pretty tempered in my responses, but when I write, I tend to say exactly what I think—usually with little regard to how it makes a reader feel.

When a student submits a paper that I suspect could use more effort and time, it’s hard for me to say that in a way that still encourages them to try. “You can do better” is a horrible thing for a student to read if they’ve tried their hardest, or been swamped with a heavy workload. At the same time, if an essay shows very little effort, it is my job as the teacher to point that out and try to motivate the student to “succeed, not survive.”

Then there’s also the question of “how wrong is wrong?” Or another way to word that is, “at what point do I say the student’s answer is ‘confusingly worded,’ and at what point do I count it as being wrong?” For instance, if I say “name a cause of the revolution” and a student answers “peasants did,” I am faced with the choice to count this as correct because “peasants revolted against their government,” or count it as wrong because the student has failed to tell me what the peasants did, or even how that actually CAUSED the revolution. It’s like writing “clouds” as the answer to “why does it rain?”

Finally, grading papers involves self-doubt. What if I made a mistake in my wording? When I get a lot of wrong answers on a certain question, it is often because my wording was not clear when I asked the question. Especially now that we have Google, there is little excuse for wrong answers on homework assignments. If there is major confusion on a topic, I find that it is often because I was not clear in my instructions or inquiry.

With all these factors in play as I grade papers, I also am faced with the idea of the overall grade. What if a student writes a great essay that deserves to be published, but has lots of typos? Should I dock points for the typos even though the student composed the best essay out of them all? Is it right that I give a shorter, less insightful essay a higher score because it has no typos?

These are things that make grading papers hard. It’s not as black and white as I’d like to believe it is. It’s hard to encourage yet be firm. It’s harder still to teach, and not alienate.

How harsh is too harsh and how kind is too kind are questions I wrestle with a lot more than my students will ever know.

I have no conclusion to my wrestling. That’s why I wrestle. Some weeks I’m harsher than others in how I grade, depending on the work load and the difficulty of the assignment. Sometimes I’m more lenient just because I don’t want to be “that teacher” who’s so harsh you hate him just because he breathes.

As I wrestle with this, though, I can’t help but notice the example God has given me as a Teacher. Sometimes God is merciful in areas in which we really don’t deserve any mercy. Sometimes God corrects us (gently and/or bluntly). The goal though, is the perfection of the individual. In the same way as a teacher of high school students, whether I am harsh or lenient, tough or easy, it’s important for me to keep in mind that my goal in my grading should be the growth of the student as they work through the subject material.

And on those days when I can see that growth—even in those assignments I dread grading—my Wednesday is even better.