The Ugly Side of Grading

I was down and out last week with some mystery virus. At first, I thought it was the flu that is going around, but after talking with my mom, I'm not sure it was actually flu. It was similar but not quite the same. I should know. I caught two different strains of flu last year, one of which landed me in the hospital (for about two hours for IV fluids because I got dehydrated because every time I tried to drink fluids, I started coughing, which set off my gag reflex. I know. I'm a mess). Anyway, so, I've labelled it a mystery virus, but for the ease of conversation, I just tell people I had the flu last week. As a result of "the flu," I slept for almost three days straight. Now my sleep schedule is all wonky. I've been working on getting it straightened out, but I have this unnerving new habit of taking four hour naps in the middle of the day. And by habit, I mean that it happened to me once. Today. But it was while I was supposed to be grading papers. And while I was napping, Mark kept trying to get a hold of me because he has strep and woke up at 3am to find that his tongue and cheek had swollen up, and he was freaking out. I found all this out after I finally woke up several hours later. Worst girlfriend ever. Anyway, now I'm having problems falling asleep. So, I thought I'd chime in with an update.

I've been grading White Fang papers this week, and it sucks. It's not because all of the essays suck. Actually, very few of them outright suck. Most of my students who would turn in sucky essays just don't bother turning in any essays. But I have decided that it really sucks to grade essays because sometimes you have to make heartbreaking decisions. I'm too nice to teach. Those of you who know me are laughing at the fact that I just called myself nice, but it's true.

They had to respond to a prompt in 800-1000 words. That's about three pages, double-spaced. If they got anywhere near 800, I gave it to them. Most of my students are used to writing essays that are no longer than 300 words. Maybe 450 if the teacher is pushing them. And I asked them to write 800 words. I know. I'm a horrible person. But I really believe that my students a) are capable of this and b) really need to be pushed to do this. The only way to fully develop your thoughts in writing is to write longer essays. I had a college professor who told us that it takes at least eight pages to fully develop a coherent idea and thesis. My students are not in college. I know that. I don't expect them to write at that level. But I did want to push them to experience writing something that is longer. In order to help them write their essays, I held three in-class workshops that discussed, at length, how to brainstorm ideas in order to respond to the prompt, how to organize an essay, how to write topic sentences, how to write a thesis, and how to write citations. My students were given all the information they needed to know in order to attempt an essay.

Which leads me to the heart break part. The essay has to respond to a specific prompt. Today, I graded a paper that was 1,140 words. Well past the limit. But only 420 words focused on the prompt, and those 420 words had no thesis. The rest of the essay was really well written, but it was an in-depth passage analysis of a passage from White Fang and had nothing to do with the prompt at all. All of my students were supposed to turn in rough drafts, which I wrote all over and gave back to them. This specific student never turned in a rough draft. If she had, she might have been able to transform her essay. Instead, I gave her a C, and I only gave her the C because she had obviously worked really hard on the passage analysis. But I really, really wanted to give her an A for effort. Unfortunately, I don't think that giving out A's for effort helps anyone.