It’s Saturday morning. I’ve been up since before the sun, working my way through three sections of essays on “The Scarlet Ibis,” a gut-wrenchingly sad short story by James Hurst. For the 22nd time this morning, I read clumsy attempts of freshman brains trying to symbolically connect the crushed red body of a tropical bird to the broken body of our narrator’s beloved little brother, Doodle. For the 22nd time this morning, I furrow my brow and scribble my thoughts in the margins. Finishing the essay, I drain the remains of my coffee cup, sigh deeply, and glance at Essay #23, glaring from the top of the pile.
I glare back, thinking there are many other things that need to be done on this weekend morning. Laundry is piled in the hamper, the dishwasher needs to be emptied, and the bathroom could certainly use some attention. That’s when I decide, Yes, I’ll go clean the bathroom.
Then it hits me. I would rather scrub a toilet than grade another essay.
Toilets over essays? Whoa. This is a problem. I set down my grading pen and start thinking. There has to be a better way. Now, I know there is.
Before I created this system, it took me 15-to-20 minutes to grade an essay. Today, with the use of a detailed coding system and a content rubric that’s laser-focused on the writing issues that matter most, I’m able to mark an essay in just under five minutes. Really.
Look, grading papers is part of the gig. We signed up to be English teachers; there’s no getting around the fact that we’re going to have to spend some time with the grading pen. The amount of time we spend on those papers, though, needs to provide a fruitful yield of learning for our students without breaking our spines.
Want to give your students meaningful feedback on their papers and watch them grow as writers? Want to have time to recharge on weekends and holidays without the burden of endless essay stacks hanging over your head? Click here for the solution.
I have purchased your e-book and am excited about using your coding system. I have a question about kids who won’t complete the essay corrections. Ideally, I would send it home with them to finish as homework; I have some students, though, who will lose the essay or who—for legitimate or non legitimate reasons!—won’t do the homework assignment. Do you withhold the essay grade until you receive the corrections? Do you assign points to the corrections to motivate students to finish them? (It won’t be a big enough problem to make everyone finish the corrections in class, but it will affect a handful of students who struggle with organization/time management/homework.) Any advice would be appreciated!
Great questions, Kim! So glad you’re thinking through how to best make this work for your kids. If I had a population that refused to complete homework or just couldn’t get homework done for whatever reason, I’d just have students do the corrections in class. Those with few errors would be able to finish on the first day I hand back the essays. Those with more errors would need to continue during our next SSR Friday reading session. And, yes, I would put a zero in gradebook for their essay grade until they finished those corrections – they’re that important! 🙂
How many points are the corrections worth? If a student does all the corrections, would they get a 100 or is it a reduced grade since they did not do it right the first time?
Thanks for checking in with me, Michelle Lynn. I’m all about simplicity when it comes to those essay corrections, which I enter as a separate 10-point completion homework grade. I avoid giving points back onto the essay grade itself because I want to have a record of students’ actual performance on their content and grammar in our online grade book so the students and the parents can see the (hopefully!) growth over the year. If I pour points back after the corrections are done, that snapshot data is lost and parents might believe an incomplete picture.
As for the grading of students’ corrections, I eyeball those. I look at their essay at any random correction, say #3 on their list of 22 corrections. Then I flip to their handwritten correction sheet and see if they did #3 correctly – written the rule and written a correct way to fix their error. Then I do that again for one later in their essay, say #17. If they correctly did that one, too, then they get their 10 points and I move on to the next paper. If the corrections aren’t done correctly, I return the paper to the student during our next SSR session to fix with me there in class to help clarify things if they get stuck.
I don’t enter essay grades in the grade book until the corrections round is done. If a kid doesn’t turn in his corrections, the essay grade is a 0 until that final step is completed. The corrections, I tell them, are the most important part of the process because that’s where they learn how to become better writers. Without the corrections, they’re not done yet with the essay project/unit. This, of course, dive-bombs their grade until they get it together to finish that work. These kids are also allowed to work on this during our next SSR session, if needed, until it’s done.
Finally, I award 10 pt. for the essay corrections hw assignment, no matter how many corrections a kid had to complete. The kids learn pretty quickly that cleaner final drafts means they’ll have a lot less homework when it comes time to make corrections.
Hope this helps!
Laura