Managing the Stack of Ungraded Papers

July 26th, 2010 By: Diane Trim in Classroom Management

I have a collection of old student essays that makes me smile. One of those essays is, “Taxidermy Changed My Life,” by Pete. (I am not making that up.) Another gem is from Kevin who wrote about wanting to become a math teacher. Kevin wanted to teach math because he could leave work at 3:30 and be at the country club for a round of golf by 4 p.m.

Kevin didn’t stick around after school long enough to see the lights on at 8 p.m. in his teachers’ classrooms, didn’t watch as the teachers left the buildings with their briefcases full of papers to grade, and didn’t come to school on the weekends when teachers set up labs or planned lessons. Kevin was a smart kid, but he had an inaccurate picture of what a teacher’s workday looks like (and paycheck, too).

I don’t have to tell you that the hours between the bells aren’t the only hours you spend on the job. According to a study by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, teachers in public schools report working 52 hours a week, 27 of those as teaching hours. In private schools, teachers report a 48-hour work week and 26 hours of teaching.

So how can I live up to Kevin’s golf fantasy when I have a briefcase full of papers? I can’t, but I can take steps to try to manage my paper load.

Create online quizzes and tests. In my world, this still isn’t possible because I don’t have easy access to a class set of laptops every day. If you do, though, a quick online quiz is the way to go. No papers to handle; just record the scores.

Don’t correct everything. Give yourself permission to not check every homework problem you assign. Some teachers circulate during the sponge activity in the beginning of class and record student homework as complete or incomplete. If you feel you need to check the homework more closely, you might collect the homework and correct just question number three. With essays, you can grade just paragraph three, too (especially useful when grading for grammar, spelling, and usage).

Clear the desk. Set a goal for yourself that you won’t leave the building on Friday until you’ve finished grading papers for the week. Allow yourself to lesson plan at home, but don’t lug around a stack of papers on the weekend. You’ll feel better if you have a break.

Use a rubric. It almost goes without saying, but not only is grading with a rubric good teaching practice, but also it makes grading a lot easier. With a clear rubric, you won’t spend half an hour trying to figure out how to grade student work that looks nothing like what you had envisioned. For example, you assign students to write a poem about nature and a student hands you a recording of his band singing lyrics you’re not sure are from a known language. How do you grade that? A rubric will help spell out your expectations on the front end, reduce the number of unpredictable student responses, and speed up your grading with a checklist.

Plan your grading time. We all know that we need to plan our lesson time, but it’s a smart idea to plan your work time as well. Expand your weekly lesson plans to include your prep time, too. If you’ve planned for a quiz for your sophomores, block off time that same day or the next to correct it. I know it’s tough, but try to stagger due dates among your classes so you don’t have 80 freshman essays on the same day you have 40 junior poetry projects to grade.

Have a small bag for correcting papers. Take it from me and my back: you do not want to carry a heavy bag with every student paper and every book you’ll ever need everywhere you go. Instead, buy a small bag that has just enough room for one set of papers to grade. Include a set of pens and a calculator. Discipline yourself to grade just that one set of papers at home, but no more than that. Having a huge bag in your backseat is overwhelming and you might not even take the bag out of the car. But you can spare 30 minutes to grade one set of papers and you can probably do it while your child is at swimming lessons or karate. Done.

Develop a routine. Just as you’d brush your teeth before you go to bed, make correcting one set of papers part of your nightly routine. If you make a regular time to correct just one set of quizzes, you’ll work your way through the stack and sleep better, knowing that you don’t have a huge pile of papers waiting for you in the morning.

Do you have any suggestions for managing your papers to grade and working in a round of golf? Do you have any humorous misconceptions about teaching that people have shared with you over the years? Please share in the comments.

Do you have an idea for a blog post you’d like to read? Do you have a question? E-mail editor Diane Trim at diane.trim@magnapubs.com

Reference:
Forster, G. and D’Andrea, C. (2009.) Free to Teach: What America’s Teachers Say about Teaching in Public and Private Schools. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. http://www.edchoice.org/downloadFile.do?id=367 Accessed July 20, 2010.

Photo credits:
Grading essays, 365-120 (April 30): nooccar on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Grading Papers [in a café]: juliecinci on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Dining room [with papers to grade]: MNicoleM on Flickr.com Creative Commons

Tags: grading

10 comments ↓

Info	Comment
Amanda 07.26.10 at 7:01 am	I do a few things regarding making grading easier, but I am also forever thinking about ways to make grading easier. I tell my kids everything counts as a grade because if I don’t, they won’t do it. Some things that help are: 1. Scantrons or answer sheets whenever possible–especially the ones that can be used more than once. It makes things much quicker. Even if you have no scantron, having a separate answer sheet helps too. 2. I only take one small stack of papers with me. That is just to have something to do while waiting for something. Many a papers have been graded while waiting for the doctor. 3. Have mini assessments that are maybe 5 questions long. They are easy to grade, record, and return. 4. Correct as they work in class with a specific color. When you get the final copies, a good bit of your work is done for you. Plus, once you start correcting, many kids get into it and want you to correct everything. 5. Grade some things for accuracy and some things for completion. 6. Since I take up something just about every day, there is not enough time in the day. If I have lots of grades in the grade book, I sometimes replace a lower grade or a zero with some assignments. 7. Pass out grade reports. Parents must sign and return, and any missing assignments must be attached. Students get some credit, but they don’t get full credit for not doing it on the first day. Those are automatic 70’s–unless they were absent.
Diane 07.26.10 at 8:45 am	Great suggestions, Amanda! Thanks! I know about not grading work – then the kids don’t do it. However, my own daughter had an algebra teacher who would just mark assigments based on completion. Let me tell you, as a parent, I could really tell when my daughter didn’t do her homework. Her quizzes and tests really reflected her effort.
Guest 07.26.10 at 8:51 am	I love having lots of computers in class and access to online projects that ‘grade themselves’. It’s a lot of front end work but the end payoff is so much easier. I reserve Sunday evening for grading, lesson preparing, etc. I know it sounds crazy but I will not let school me invade on my Saturday. I also do lots of behind the scenes work during the summer. Most other teachers can’t understand why I work so hard during summer but I know that any work done ahead of time makes my year go by so much smoother. Much of my summer work is late at night anway. As a history teacher I use a lot of short answer (2-3 sentences) questions so that I can see that the student ‘got it’. I use essays only twice a year because of the work load they present by having 197+ students to grade. I tend to hate the old Q&A because It never tells me anything. I prefer the “What if” type of questions which are more telling such as “What if the British had won the Battle of New Orleans?”. Now they have to give me their own thoughts. Would I love time to go fishing, traveling, take a cruise, even just take a weekend vacation? My vacations always mean going with my second spouse – my laptop.
Diane 07.26.10 at 9:01 am	Hey, Guest. Thanks for the comment. I loved two things that you wrote: I reserve Sunday evening for grading, lesson preparing, etc. I know it sounds crazy but I will not let school me invade on my Saturday. and I also do lots of behind the scenes work during the summer. [...] I know that any work done ahead of time makes my year go by so much smoother. Much of my summer work is late at night anway. You are a teache after my own heart. My husband always asked me why I worked so hard during the summer. My reason? So I can sleep during the week in the fall! I really admire the way you take off Saturdays. Way to go. Me, I defended my weekends, too. You have to draw a line somewhere. What I struggled with the most was my prep time. I always had journalism students in the journalism room during my prep time. It’s hard to shove them away and grade those papers, especially when the kids were on deadline. Thanks for the great comment!
Guest 07.26.10 at 2:38 pm	I teach third grade and one thing that I do that helps is when I create tests, I create an answer key and I grade tests as my students are taking them. I start as soon as the first student finishes and because they don’t end at the same time, I find that when all my students have completed the test, I’ve cut the amount I have to grade in half. This may not work for older students because of cheating but my students never really caught on even when I graded right next to them. I also reconsidered homework, especially if I’m not checking all of it. I’ve read research on homework and there really is not much correlation between even the best homework and better school performance. You might want to ask yourself even before you assign something, how is this going to be pushing my students forward? A lot of the time, I found that those students who performed well on the homework didn’t really need it and those that could use the extra help actually need more support than they received and ended up struggling through the assignment with very little learning or reinforcing of the right methods.
Diane 07.26.10 at 2:44 pm	Hi, Guest! Thanks for the comment. I’ve found that I have to monitor my high school students during a test or quiz. However, I love the way you gain time while students complete the test! You know, I think there’s a homework study out there for just about any teaching style. I find, as an English teacher, that I just can’t avoid giving homework – especially chapters to read at home. For me, my homework practice mirrors what they’ll expect in higher education and even in the job world. They’ll encounter very few instances where they won’t be expected to do some work outside of class or office hours. Of course, I don’t want to be excessive about it, but I do check for understanding to hold them accountable for what they’ve read or done. Thanks a lot for the comment, reader!
Guest 07.27.10 at 7:48 am	Diane, another suggestion that helps with grading in the evening time or on the weekend is having another copy of the teacher’s edition on hand. IF POSSIBLE keep an extra copy at home so that is one less thing to carry back and forth.
Diane 07.27.10 at 8:48 am	Hey, Guest, that’s so smart! Instead of lugging those huge teacher’s editions of the textbook around, keep one at home. My trick for landing one of these: cozy up to the textbook company rep. Often, they’ll have preview copies or used teacher’s editions. Of course, they only show up in the building at textbook adoption time, so the window for this trick is limited.
Guest 07.27.10 at 3:59 pm	Consider using IFAT forms whenever you might use a multiple-choice test. I wouldn’t use these often, but I really feel that they help make summative assessment a bit more meaningful for students. (Most of my middle school students LOVE this method, btw.) http://www.epsteineducation.com/home/
Diane 07.27.10 at 4:16 pm	Guest, that’s fascinating. I’ve never heart of IFAT forms before. After looking at the link, I can see where students would find them engaging. I can also see someone shouting out Bingo! or I won 50 bucks!. Then again, I taught high school.

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Managing the Stack of Ungraded Papers

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