I am finally getting around to grading the big scary criticism essays the kids wrote. (This is the only assignment this year that I have slacked on. The kids are shocked, but actually pretty cool about the fact that I haven’t done it. heh) Each paper is taking about 8 minutes to grade. There are ~100 papers. This means it will take over 13 hours of grading. Holy crudmonkeys Batman. *sigh* I have done 6 papers so far. I started with my cruddy class on purpose (6th period just doesn’t have very many strong students… I don’t know why…) so that things would improve steadily as I go through grading. I have one B-, a couple of C’s and a D so far. Ugh. This is expected, but not cheerful. I’ve been grading for a while this morning. I’m trying to grade 5-10 then take a break, then come back. It doesn’t help that I have massive amounts of house cleaning I want to do and I would much rather be just cleaning. *sigh*

The problem is: I put a lot of comments on each essay. They worked hard on these papers and I belive they deserve to understand what they are doing well and what they are doing poorly. But see, all of my teacher training has told me that a lot of comments are BAD because they freak out the kids and they don’t read them or care anyway. But I still think that they deserve to know how they are doing, Damnit. So I will comment. And I will give them 5 minutes at the end of class to go over the comments and ask questions if they need to.

The last time I did a big hard push on grading I had Erik and Noah help me and we sat around drinking alcohol and making catty comments. That was awesome. 🙂 I wish that these essays could be treated the same way… Maybe we can do that again for the next batch of writers workshop stories. 🙂 Those are less formal and it’s ok for those math/science boys to help grade those ones. I don’t trust them with literary criticism. 😉