Grading is harder than usual this semester.
I guess some of it was to be expected. When students don't have the opportunity to chat about assignments in class, misunderstandings don't get cleared up and some unexpected stuff gets submitted. Of course they're free to email me with questions, but sometimes students don't know that they're confused until somebody else asks a question they can't answer.
And some of the issue is that students have also been slogging through the pandemic for more than a year now, and they are tired and isolated and not always bringing their A game. It is straightforward, on the one hand, to give a zero to the student who didn't turn in anything (again). It is not straightforward, though, to know what to do about the fact that she keeps not turning things in. Coupled with another fact (she did not respond to my email asking if everything was okay) and a third fact (she can't graduate if she fails my class), the zero feels weighty.
But I can't make her answer my email.
I think one of the reasons grading is hard is that it requires constant task-switching. Every time I set one exam aside and pick up another, something in my brain says, "I don't want to do this again." I know a lot of tricks to override that voice. I grade with a timer, I grade with some external accountability, I create some time pressure for myself, I give myself something to look forward to after I complete a certain number of exams. More loftily, I have blogged about trying to regard grading as an act of service for my students. And yet-- it remains slow, repetitive, frustrating, and often extremely cognitively demanding. I need to be clear in my own brain on the difference between a 13/15 and a 13.5/15-- mostly because it's the right thing to do, but also because the students who studied together will ask me why they got different grades on the same question. But it's a pretty subtle difference, that half-point.
I am finding, here in month 13 of the pandemic, that my capacity to keep making myself do slow repetitive frustrating cognitively demanding tasks is diminished -- so much so that I found myself wondering if I'd had COVID without realizing it. Maybe that would explain the brain fog, I thought. But maybe I am just tired, and lonely, and overwhelmed by the work of prepping a new class and putting two others online in a semester with no spring break. Maybe even as I felt worried about getting my revisions done earlier in the semester, I was also glad that they needed doing on a deadline, because they required me to focus on something worthwhile outside my teaching.
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