I've dedicated several hours of my Sunday to grading papers my students wrote this week and I've managed to get through 30. That's right, 30 of the 110 papers I have to grade. While on some level I find that thoroughly depressing I also think it's a reflection of how much time I spend on their papers.
My first year I found grading papers to be somewhat overwhelming. What makes an A paper? I wasn't entirely sure. I experimented with various rubrics until I came across this one that I thought encompassed all the aspects that I wanted to include in my grading of papers.
I thought this rubric was the answer to all my paper grading woes. Going into my second year I graded the first paper using this rubric. Of course I still did my traditional notes in purple pen in the margins and the bottom of the paper, but I really felt that this rubric would help guide the students on what was strong/weak about their papers. Unfortunately I noticed their second papers had the same mistakes as their first, so clearly this rubric and my comments weren't getting through. I tried to conference with students, but would often run out of time, and it was like nailing jello to a tree to get them to come before or after school to conference.
Then towards the end of last year I read Teaching with Your Mouth Shut, most of which I didn't find applicable to my students or the kind of classroom I wanted to run, but I did find one gem in there. Finkel expressed some of the same frustrations over student papers that I did above. He started writing his students letters about their papers. He found their responsiveness to the information in the letters to be much greater than when he left the same information in comments in the margins or at the end of the paper.
I decided to give it a try last year when only my honors students were writing papers. All the students were thrilled to receive a letter specifically addressed to them with my thoughts on their papers. At least half of the students came on their own initiative to see me about their papers and ask about what I wrote in the letters. Their writing also improved because they actually took my advice and comments under consideration.
This year I am writing ever single one of my students a letter about their first paper. Since this is the first time I'm seeing their writing (and this is the first time they're experiencing my grading) I've found that I have a lot to say. Is writing each student a letter, and filling out a rubric for them excessive? Probably. Does it get results? Yes. So it will take me a while to get through these papers, but I'm hoping that my efforts will pay off and the students will think it was worth the wait to get them back.
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