My least favorite part of the job

I am grading grading grading. Well, actually, I am writing a blog post at this exact moment, but I am thinking unhappy thoughts about grading as I write. Which totally ought to count as grading, if you ask me.

When I first TA'd for my advisor in the semester right after Stella was born, I was astounded -- truly flab.ber.gast.ed -- at the time it took to grade their work. And then! I returned the assignments I had labored over (really, I might have preferred to deliver another baby) -- and they complained. It's not fair! Can't I get partial credit? How was I supposed to know?

Um, because it was spelled out clearly in the instructions?

I suppose I have improved a lot since 2009, but that's not saying much. I've been thinking over the past couple of weeks about why it plagues me so.

1. I have to think, and keep thinking. Concentration (I sound like that ill-fated Barbie) is hard. There are so many tasks I can do on autopilot that sitting down with something that (a) I have to think about and (b) I'm less than thrilled to think about is a recipe for procrastination.
2. Google is making me stupid. Dude, the internet is the scourge of my existence. You know, when it's not the best thing ever. Sometimes I have the attention span of a brain-injured fruit fly, and it is far too easy to click away for "just a minute" from my online grading.
3. I have impostor syndrome. I worry that I didn't make the instructions clear enough. I worry that it wasn't a good assignment. After-the-fact worrying is useless, but I do it anyway.
4. I am a perfectionist. Consistent grading is important, but I spend too much time thinking, "This is a little better than the other assignment that had some of the same problems. Are they going to talk to each other and demand to know why they got different grades? Am I being fair to both of them?"
5. I am a pleaser. This one is embarrassing, you guys, but it's an obstacle. I think, if I give this paper the grade it deserves, it will displease the student. And then I hesitate to press the submit button. Some of this concern is practical: Will that disappointment translate into nasty eval comments that might affect my future? Much of it is abstract: I am wired not to displease, even when my job requires displeasing.
6. There are few hard deadlines. It is so easy to procrastinate, with the result that it hangs over my head for days and days as I slowly nibble away at it. I don't take a crazy long time with grading -- the batch of writing assignments I will return tonight NO MATTER WHAT was submitted eight days ago and it's an unusually busy time for me -- but I wish I had given them back at the beginning of the week and not the end.
7. It is almost entirely a thankless task. More than 99% of the feedback I get about grades is of the "ur doin it rong" variety. The undergrads need good grades to get into grad school. The grad students are accustomed to getting good grades. (That's how they got into grad school.) Nobody wants to hear that her writing needs work. I did get one student comment in May along the lines of "I've really appreciated your high standards this year." But...mostly they think I'm a leetle uptight about writing. ("A leetle uptight" = "crazypants usage-Nazi chill-out-about-semicolons-already-Dr.-Gladly obsessed.")

SIGH. I was in the Adoration chapel and the thought popped into my head that I could think of grading as my version of foot-washing -- a yucky task that can be a service to my students. Have you ever had your feet washed? I had it done once as part of preparation for a retreat, and it made me very uncomfortable even as it blew my mind. I can't spend too much time worrying about making my students uncomfortable in the line of duty. Now I just have to communicate that message to my fruit-fly brain.

Comments

[Maggie]

I feel so much better reading this list! I'm teaching first year composition this semester and it's my first time in a classroom--I struggle with all of the above as well, but I chalked that up to new teacher nerves. I like the idea of thinking of this as foot-washing; hoping that sticks in my fruit-fly brain!

[Bearing]

Okay, I like this a lot. Related musings have appeared in response on my blog.

[Susan]

I hear ya. I hate grading too. And a lot of it has to do with being a pleaser.

[Lilian]

oh, this post is my life too!! Every single item, I mean, with slight variations, I'd love to come and comment in more detail on every one, but I need to drive home and... grade 100 tests and 30 compositions!!

P.S. We do foot-washing in our denomination before every communion (which happen several times a year, not every service). It is a bit weird, but very significant. A humble task with a lot of symbolism.

[Kristin]

"I have impostor syndrome."

I know it well. I've actually called it the Imposter Complex since I first discovered I had it, back at the beginning of grad school, when I was convinced that they'd made a terrible mistake in admissions, and it was only a matter of time before everyone figured it out....

I now work in a great little school full of fantastic kids and brilliant colleagues, around whom I routinely feel like a bowl of soggy cereal. I have to remind myself that I actually DO know my field, and I actually AM a good teacher...and the truth is, I really love working with people who keep me on my toes, even if it means I don't relax much. ;-)

And I'm also a pleaser. On the rare occasions when I've had to grade a kid really severely, I've agonized and agonized. Our college office guy once turned to me in a faculty meeting after I said something about feeling sad about a grade I was giving a student, and he looked me very straight in the eye and said, "No. Not the grade you're giving him. The grade he earned."

"Right," I said. "Thank you."

I love my colleagues. =)

[Pippi]

I know I've made a similar comment before but when I was an undergrad I really appreciated profs and TAs like you who took time with my work and gave me the grade I deserved. I had a lot more respect for the TA who gave me an A on my first paper (a 90% which was crazy good at my school for writing) and then gave me a well-deserved B- (or was it a C+?) on the next one. I never thanked them enough. Or at all. People are quicker to complain than to praise and I'm guilty of it, too. I bet you have students like me in classes you quietly appreciate your hard work.

[Melanie B]

Somehow I missed this and only found it today. I wish I could have found it a decade ago when I was teaching composition and facing stacks of dreaded grading. I wouldn't have felt so alone. I wonder if the foot washing analogy would have helped?

All your reasons resonate with me, but I'd have to add one more. I think for me the hardest thing about grading was that I really just wanted to give students critiques without the grades. I wanted to help them improve their writing, and I wanted them to want to improve the writing for its own sake and not for the sake of a better grade. For me a huge portion of the burden of grading was this internal wrangling about the very idea of assigning GRADES and the constant suspicion that all my attempts to be an objective grader were a shadowplay and that grading was always highly subjective and no matter what I did I was just giving better grades to the pieces I liked and worse grades to the ones I didn't like. I'm much happier in the role of editor or mentor than while wielding the red pen of doom.