The Truth About Grading

I finally handed back all of the papers I had today. Last week, it was my developmental writers. This week, it's my more advanced 200-level writers. They're all decent writers, so grading becomes less about correcting grammar and more about how they fulfill the requirements of the specific essay assignment. This is much more art than science.

The students had to chose a piece of rhetoric (speech, op-ed, or advertisement) and break down the rhetorical "tricks" the author/speaker/creator used. They were limited to using the six essays we had discussed in class about rhetoric. I had approved their selected piece, seen an outline, and given feedback on their introductions. We had done a number of peer review and self-assessment exercises in class. The peer review questions addressed the exact questions I would be asking when grading, as well as the self-assessment exercise. I felt confident that if the students attended class and took the exercises seriously, they would produce decent essays. 

I was partially right. I neglected to include an assignment checklist, which I give to my developmental writers, wrongly assuming that the 200-level students didn't need one. Essays are like a house of cards; take away one of the fundamental pieces, and the whole thing collapses. But how badly did it collapse? Was the roof missing or was it just a mess of cards? And what corresponding grade accompanies each unique deficiency?

Take the following example: I have one student whom I particularly get along with. We both lived in Southern California, and he's tracked me down after class to talk about living in a place so completely different from the one where we currently find ourselves. He comes to class, does all the work, and does it well. He chose a particularly challenging piece of visual rhetoric: an illustration used pre-American Revolution that was intended to garner support for taking up arms against the British. We talked about how it would be a challenging, but possibly rewarding project. 

The end result was well-written and thorough, but poorly organized and neglected to refer to any of the rhetorical tricks we had discussed and they were required to use. So what grade does that earn? Complicating matter is that I like the kid and I know that he has worked hard on the paper. If I give him a C, am I being too harsh, but if I don't, am I being too generous? It's hard to compare the papers because each paper did different things well and poorly. If I didn't know who this student was, what grade would I give the paper? 

I don't know. I can never know, really. Built into my writing classes are lots of opportunities for feedback directly from me, meaning that submitting papers anonymously is practically impossible. Getting to know my students is my way of a) remembering who they are and b) knowing how best to give them feedback. I might not have the time or freedom to personalize how I deliver the courses I teach, but I do have complete power over how and what I say to my students to help them become better writers. The only way that works is if I get to know them as much as I get to know their writing. 

You could argue that I took the easy way out of the problem; I decided that each student would have an opportunity to revise and resubmit their essays for a new grade. I knew that the aforementioned student would be troubled by the grade that I gave him (he was) and would come to talk to me (he did) with the aim of rewriting and improving what he had done. I knew that all of the students who had worked hard but produced flawed papers would come and see me in order to be able to resubmit their revised papers. I also knew that a poor grade would serve as a wake-up call for the students who weren't taking me seriously yet. 

Grading is, indeed, an art, but one I take very seriously. The feedback I give to justify that grade is as much an art and no less important. If getting to know my students makes the former job more difficult, so be it. The latter is more meaningful in the long run.

Working Smarter, Not Harder (Take 2)

You can find the first version of the post here.

Why a second draft? You can read about that here.

Growing up, I wasn't good at a lot of things; I was hopeless with a ball, or worse, a stick and a ball, completely useless as a runner, climber, or any sort of movement on land. But put me in the water, and I was a fish or a dolphin, a clear natural. My mom put me in swimming lessons before I could even walk, and, since then, I had always been told, because swimming seemed to come easily to me, that I was destined for great things. 

When I was fourteen, however, I hit a wall; my times stopped improving and even started to get slower. I tried to push myself in training, swimming until my lungs burned and my muscles failed. I was in the pool at 5:30 AM every day for two hours, back again in the evenings for three more. And yet, at the end of every race, I would look up and see a time that was stagnant.

I continued swimming competitively until I was nineteen. Five years is a long time to kill yourself in the water for little gain. I couldn't understand why my times weren't improving. Was it because I had hit puberty and my body was no longer "built" for swimming? This was a time before Dara Torres, and female swimmers were believed to peak at fourteen or fifteen. Most girls quit, but I stubbornly stuck with it. Perhaps "greatness" was no longer in the cards, but I was going to get a best time, even if it killed me. Day in and day out, I lifted weights and worked out in the pool. It didn't kill me, but it did kill my knees and shoulders. Although I had planned to swim in college, after one semester, my body and spirit had had enough. It was too hard to balance the demands of college and swimming. I quit and focused instead on my education. 

Looking back now, I may have worked hard in the pool, but I didn't take very good care of myself outside of the pool. My eating habits were atrocious, and my sleeping habits weren't very much better. I would kill myself in the pool and leave my body little to no support in the recovery. It was no coincidence that not only did I hit puberty at fourteen, but my parents also got divorced. Everyday, I swam distracted; swimming was easy and an escape for me, so my mind was never really focused at the task at hand. It wasn't until I began training as a Master's swimmer that I realized how important that focus is.

Five years and twenty pounds later, I began to train again. I was in the middled of my PhD, teaching college students, and well on my way to fulfilling my goal of becoming a university professor. Something was still missing, however. I missed the water, the camaraderie, and the physical challenge that swimming provided. I joined a Master's swim team. We only trained an hour a day, five days a week. Many weeks, I couldn't even make all five practices. It felt so good to be in the water again. My shoulders weren't an issue anymore. And while my lungs still burned and my muscles just about failed at the end of a workout, I could finally see the effort paying off. Despite my extra weight and age, on top of the severely reduced training time, at the end of the year, my times were almost as fast as they were when I had left competitive swimming.

My coaches preached swimming and training smarter, not harder. We had a limited amount of time to train, so every moment had to be as close to excellence as possible. Every stroke, every turn, every push off the wall should be nearly perfect. This took an incredible amount of mental discipline, someting I didn't have when I was swimming as a teen. It was doubly important for me because if I let up my concentration on my stroke, my shoulders would start to complain loudly. I started to understand how just simply mindlessly going through the motions, no matter how much effort I had put into those motions, had lead me to peak at such an early age.

Now that I am university instructor, when I teach writing, I try to get my students to understand that effort is important, but they need to work hard at doing the right things and doing things right. It doesn't necessarily make the work any easier, but it does make the work more meaningful and rewarding.

Practicing What I Preach

In my developmental writing class, the students just turned in their narrative essay assignment. The topic was to describe an event in their lives that shaped their attitude towards school or education. Initially, I asked them to write on the topic as a "free write" during the first ten minutes of class. When I handed it back to them, I congratulated them on having written a first draft of their essay.

We read other narrative essays, talked about pacing and organization, making sure your story has a point, as well as including vivid details, or showing instead of telling. We did outlines, different peer review exercises, as well as turning it into a more familiar looking grammar exercise (pressing enter at the end of every sentence). The assignment was only 750 words long, which most students cleared without problem. I saw students beginning to gain confidence in their own ideas and their own writing. 

And then came time to grade them. It was frustrating for me to go through the papers that I knew the student had worked so hard on but still came up short. How do I give feedback on these papers while making sure that the students didn't get discouraged or give out, without it sounding like empty encouragement? It inspired me to write my latest blog post on working smarter, not harder, but it also gave me an idea on how to let the kids know that all writing can be improved, as well as putting into practice (again) their critical reading skills. 

I printed out copies of my blog post and after I had handed back the students their essays, I passed them out and told the students to have at my writing. They read the essays by themselves, but paired off to talk about how I could improve the essay. They spent almost 30 minutes tearing my writing a new one. I was filled with incredible pride when my words were coming back to me, directed at my own work; they had really got it. 

My conclusion was too abrupt. I was missing important pieces of information (who was Dara Torres? When did you decide to be a teacher? When did you start swimming? What does swimming smarter even mean?), as well as jumping to far forward in time (you told me that I couldn't do that!). I had sentence fragments, muddled syntax (although they didn't call it that), and missing words. They looked at the story as a whole, as well as the individual word choices (you use the same word a lot) and grammar issues. 

The students seemed to really enjoy it. It helped that I sat there with a smile on my face the entire time. All it took was for that first student to speak up and offer their (tentative) advice and for me to acknowledge and accept it. I tried to show them that all writing can be improved and that feedback isn't personal, it's made in order to make your writing better. The message, found in the post itself, is that we all need to find a way to channel our effort in order to get the best results. 

Writing has always come easy for me, but it can always be better. For my students, here is the end result of their hard work on my writing. 

Lessons in Working Smarter, not Harder

Growing up, I wasn't good at a lot of things; I was hopeless with a ball, or worse, a stick and a ball, completely useless as a runner, climber, or any sort of movement on land. But put me in the water, and I was a fish. A dolphin. A natural. I had always been told that I was destined for great things as a swimmer. When I was fourteen, however, I hit a wall; my times stopped improving and even started to  get slower. I tried to push myself in training, swimming until my lungs burned and my muscles failed. I was in the pool at 5:30 AM every day for two hours, back again in the evenings for three more. And yet, at the end of every race, I would look up and see a time that was stagnant.

I continued swimming competitively until I was nineteen. Five years is a long time to kill yourself in the water for little gain. I couldn't understand why my times weren't improving. Was it because I had hit puberty and my body was no longer "built" for swimming? This was a time before Dara Torres, and female swimmers were believed to peak at fourteen or fifteen. Most girls quit. But I stubbornly stuck with it. Perhaps "greatness" was not longer in the cards, but I was going to get a best time, even if it killed me. Day in and day out, I lifted weights and worked out in the pool. It didn't kill me, but it did kill my knees and shoulders. Although I had planned to swim in college, after one semester, my body and spirit had had enough. I quit.

Looking back, I may have worked hard in the pool, but I didn't take very good care of myself outside of the pool. My eating habits were atrocious, and my sleeping habits weren't very much better. I would kill myself in the pool and leave my body little to no support in the recovery. It was also no coincidence that not only did puberty hit at fourteen, but my parents' divorce as well. Everyday, I swam distracted; swimming was easy and an escape for me, so my mind was never really focused at the task at hand. It wasn't until I began training as a Master's swimmer that I realized how important that focus is.

Five years and twenty pounds later, I began to train again. I missed the water, the camaraderie, and the physical challenge. I joined a Master's swim team. We only trained an hour a day, five days a week. Many weeks, I couldn't even make all five practices. It felt so good to be in the water again. My shoulders weren't an issue anymore. And while my lungs still burned and my muscles just about failed at the end of a workout, I could finally see the effort paying off. Despite my extra weight and age, on top of the severely reduced training time, at the end of the year, my times were almost as fast as they were when I had left competitive swimming.

My coaches preached swimming and training smarter, not harder. We had a limited amount of time to train, so every moment had to be as close to excellence as possible. Every stroke, every turn, every push off the wall should be nearly perfect. This took an incredible amount of mental discipline, someting I didn't have when I was swimming as a teen. It was doubly important for me because if I let up my concentration on my stroke, my shoulders would start to complain loudly. I started to understand how just simply mindlessly going through the motions, no matter how much effort I had put into those motions, had lead me to peak at such an early age.

When I teach writing, I try to get my students to understand that effort is important, but they need to work hard at doing the right things and doing things right. It doesn't necessarily make the work any easier, but it does make the work more meaningful and rewarding.