ALL MY LITTLE STACKS OF PAPER ARE SORTED AND SCORED.
ALL.
IT IS FINISHED.
Until, that is, tomorrow morning at 9am when I give a final exam, and there will be a fresh new stack delivered unto me. And another on Wednesday. And Thursday.
<weeps quietly in the corner>
Sisyphus, you piker!
Too bad you can’t drink while grading.
Right?
Have a celebratory cup of grog flavored tea, and get a good nights sleep.
Wait, why can’t I drink while grading?
Hope you manage some sleep unhounded by dreams of stacks and stacks and stacks of papers to grade while running out of red ink…
um
No reason.
It wouldn’t really impair your judgement.
Probably.
Woo, you survived it! Feels good, man; don’t it?
Kudos to you for not turfing all that work to the TA. I recall in Med School, the Biochem prof having his grad students grade by hand his exams.
I’m marking right now. Have been at it for nearly 9 hours with only a couple of short breaks. Eyeballs smoldering. Big class, long exam, but I think I can put this one to rest by midnight. No time to read the day’s offerings. Back to it.
I can’t imagine doing a lot of short answer/essay tests. We only have ~45 students who primarily did multiple choice tests and it’s still taking forever to do the grading. However, we also had to do a ton of makeup tests since a lot of the students aren’t able to attend super regularly.
Also, here is a short list of things that do not make giving tests more fun: the building owners testing the fire alarms in the middle of class, several hours of unexpected power outage, having to make sure the recycled test booklets don’t already have the answers marked.
Heh. I substitute-taught second-graders today, and it was all busywork. I didn’t have to grade squat. I bollixed up my hand banging on a desk trying to get their attention, so couldn’t have graded anyhow, but neener-neener. (Seriously, an alphabet-sort of holiday words, and they all faded out around “candle” – should have just sent that on home to the parents.)
I had an english teacher who I always hoped would settle in with a glass of wine to grade essays. I suspect he might have, and he seemed to be quite a bit more forgiving.
Menyambal,
Yeah, I loved subbing. I got to go in and have fun with the teenagers without having the responsibility of grading.
Then I let my friend who was named the principal of a new school talk me into teaching full time, and I had to deal with all that grading for seven years. I’m medically retired now, and I really miss the teenagers, but I sure don’t miss all that grading.
magistramarla, and other teachers, riddle me this: In taking college classes in math, about half of the instructors utilized the online system for daily homework. Within this system, every student could complete their homework every night. After you finish a problem it would tell you if you were wrong. There were unlimited chances for redoing the problem and getting it right. Every student should have gotten a 100% on homework, with instant feedback on what they were doing wrong. Also, the instructor would not have to manually grade this, the computer does. So why did half of my instructors eschew this? They would give full credit for homework papers turned in, regardless of whether or not the problems were done correctly. More work for them and me. I guess I just don’t see the appeal.
In Austria, for each course that isn’t “exam-immanent” (lab courses generally are), the professor must offer three exam dates per semester, and the students can choose which one they’ll attend. I suppose that spreads the burden more evenly.
Wednesday exam in progress, soon to be turned in. Vanishing down grading rabbit hole imminent. Tell my next of kin I fought the valiant fight if I don’t return.
I’m done with mine and officially on vacation, not that I won’t work, but FREEDOM!!! sort of
Now that you have a cat, you can switch to the easy way of grading.
Step 1: stand at the top of a flight of stairs with all the exam papers and throw the stack high into the air over them.
Step 2: let the cat play on the papers for a while.
Step 3: Give the papers at the top the highest marks and so on down.
Step 4: Give the cat a treat.
Heh. Kindergarteners yesterday, only five pages accomplished, and I collected nothing. (I did all the math for some of them, but they still wrote it in wrong.) Few substitutes needed today, and I ain’t one of them – pants are not being worn. Tomorrow is the party day before vacation, and there will be no schoolwork. I like this end of the academic spectrum.