I’ve learned that with student assistants or parent volunteers, it’s best to outline your expectations from the beginning so that there are no misunderstandings. Unfortunately, I didn’t do that with my parent volunteer and she ran amok. Eventually, I had to go to my principal to rein the parent in.

With my student assistants, my expectations are that they show up on time and are ready to work: this is not a study hall for them.  My objective for my students is that they improve their knowledge of English while helping me out. My objective for my parents is that they assist student learning (without taking over the class).

I’ll give you my task list and put SA (for student assistant) or CV (for Classroom Volunteer) after each activity. You’ll notice that I don’t have my student assistants or classroom volunteers grade papers. I’m uncomfortable with that. However, you might find a way to make it work.

• Take small groups across the hall to read, CV
• File papers, SA
• Type up tests, worksheets, SA
• Create test keys, SA – I love for them to do this with grammar, spelling, and usage tests
• Develop enrichment projects, SA, CV
• Create bulletin boards for units, SA, CV
• Assist with club meetings, CV
• Pull resource materials from the library, SA, CV
• Preview websites for a web quest, SA, CV
• Supervise field trips, CV
• Upload student projects to the class website, SV
• Create sample projects for students to use as a guide, SV
• Help students make up missing assignments, SA, CV
• Assist students with assignments during work time, CV
• Mediate student disputes, SA, CV
• Administer make up tests, SA, CV
• Prepare visual aids, SA, CV
• Restock classroom supplies, SA, CV
• Make photocopies, SA, CV
• Create seating charts, SA
• Create educational classroom games, SA
• Monitor students, CV
• Set up labs, SA, CV
• Tutor individual students, SA, CV

How do you keep classroom volunteers or student assistants occupied in a meaningful way? Even better: how do you grade your student assistants? Have you had good luck with your classroom volunteers and student assistants or have your experiences been more like a bad horror film? Share in the comments!

Photo credits:
Poppo’s lil’ Helper: Јerry on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Daddy’s helper again: rbphalen / Rebecca on Flickr.com Creative Commons
vacuuming @ cheeky monkey toys: jencu / jenny cu on Flickr.com Creative Commons

Music is universal. It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t like music or who doesn’t have a preference for a particular sound. For a teen, his music is synonymous with his group of friends and his clothing. It’s a part of his identity.

As a parent of a teen, I know that some of the music she listens to is painful to my ears. But the more I try to appreciate it, the more the gap between our generations decreases.

One of the most successful things I ever did in class had to do with music. Although it started as a part of my poetry unit, it developed into something much larger and with more benefits.

As a part of my poetry unit, I invited students to submit their favorite song (classroom appropriate) along with a printed copy of the lyrics for the class to listen to and analyze for poetic devices like similes and imagery. It was always a popular activity, but one semester, I received more CDs than I had class time.

 A student suggested that I play a song during the last five minutes of classroom work time. So I did.

The problem was that my CD pile didn’t diminish; it increased. Students started coming into the room way before the bell rang for class to start so they could play a CD while the rest of the class filed in and started work on the sponge activity. They lined up to have the honor to play the class out as they exited the room, too.

I had to develop rules for the stereo: no sound over #5 on the volume control and no unapproved CDs. The students made their own list to take turns for the honor of playing exit and entry bumper music and they policed the stereo, too. They loved the music privilege and wouldn’t allow unauthorized CDs to mess up the system. They knew that if I heard inappropriate lyrics, the whole music thing would come to an end.

Not only were the kids interested in coming to class on time, but we also developed a personal connection. I learned early on that I couldn’t say that I didn’t like Good Charlotte’s simple lyrics or that I found Eminem’s music grating. That kid would be crushed.  I had to find the good in each piece of music that I listened to. Compliment the music and you compliment the student.

Students who were hard to reach struck up conversations with me about their favorite bands and we formed a personal connection that I don’t think we would have had otherwise. I was able to leverage that connection to benefit their school work. I think these students worked more in my class than before because I had taken an interest in them and their music. When I approached them about plot diagrams and characterization, they were willing to listen to me because I had already listened to them.

Of course, playing music didn’t solve every classroom management issue. We had minor skirmishes over lost CDs (no one could bring in an original copy), what lyrics were really inappropriate (whatever I said was inappropriate was the standard), and skipping in line (how do you handle absences?). But the kids cared about the music and their ability to choose what to listen to in an adult-controlled environment. Ultimately, that won the day – and their trust.

Have you used music in your classroom to create a personal connection? I know teachers who play soft music during work time. Have you been successful with that technique? Do you use songs to teach? How have you used music to enhance learning in your classroom? Please share in the comments.

Photo credits:
Paramount Theatre – Wurlitzer Concert Organ: justj0000lie / Julie Vazquez on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Barber Shop Quartet: d4rr3ll / Darrell Taylor on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Jono on Accordian: DoNotLick / Jennifer Boriss on Flickr.com Creative Commons

Like anything else, good procedures make the Brainstorming session go smoothly. I set down the procedures early in the year and use a transparency to remind the class of my expectations every time we Brainstorm. Sure, it’s redundant, but I think that the sessions go more smoothly when everyone understands what to do.

Here are my rules:

• No self-editing. You have an idea? Great! Share it.
• No peer-editing. You think someone’s idea is lousy? Keep your criticism to yourself.
• Be wild and crazy. Sometimes the best ideas come from the wacky suggestions.
• Use springboards. Use other people’s ideas to create new ones.

The problem is that students’ negative comments still slip out. I’m guilty of it myself, especially when a student suggests something really crazy. But comments like, “That’s not new,” or “Yes, but…,” or, “That won’t work” aren’t helpful to the Brainstorming process.

To shut down the Brainstorm session saboteurs, I list positive comments at the bottom of the Brainstorming Procedures transparency and review those with the class. It’s not very helpful to list unacceptable comments on the transparency. Listing unacceptable comments leads to an absurdist discussion where teens will suggest other unacceptable comments and try to out-do one another. It’s better to bypass that game and stick to positive comments.

 Here are some comments that make the positive comments list: great suggestion, that’s original, I like that, and very smart.

At first, the positive comment list is fodder for my classroom jokers. They’ll choose a positive comment and say it in a stilted voice or imitate my own voice. That’s fine. The words are good and laughter is positive.

What’s better is that these students are unwittingly on my side.

When a class member tries to sabotage the Brainstorming session, I can rely on one of my jokers to gleefully correct him. It’s terrific.

So, how do you shut down the Brainstorm session saboteurs? Do you have a Brainstorming method to share? Please add a comment to the discussion!

Extending classroom learning outside the school walls is a great idea; it reinforces objectives and makes for better classroom discussions. But the same ol’ read-and-respond assignments get dull. It’s good for everyone to mix up the assessments. It’s great to appeal to students’ learning styles. After all, the brain loves novelty.

1. Treasure hunt. After reading the chapter, find three small objects from home that a person in the chapter would have found useful. Bring the objects to class and be prepared to explain your reasoning.
2. List five things/diagram. After reading the chapter, list five things you’ve learned. Create a diagram that represents these five things in a graphic manner.
3. Haiku. The three-line unrhymed Japanese poem has a simple structure: five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. The poem should have a sensory word and some contain a comparison. Instead of a chapter summary, ask students to create a haiku for the chapter.
4. Real-world example. If you’re teaching the sine wave, ask students to bring in examples of the sine wave in action (photos from magazines or newspapers are fine). If you’re teaching about adverbs, ask students to bring in a newspaper article with 10 adverbs circled.
5. Write a Tweet. Twitter messages are 140 characters in length. After reading the chapter, ask students for a humorous tweet from the main character or person. For examples of this kind of tweet, visit Historical Tweets.
6. List five things/pantomime. After reading the chapter, list five things you’ve learned. Develop a short pantomime for each of the five things. Be prepared to show the class one of your five things while the rest of us guess which concept you’re acting out.
7. Sell something. After reading the chapter, find an object from your house to “sell.” The item should be perfect for one of the people in the reading or solve a problem that the reading presents. Be prepared to present a 30-second commercial for your object and explain why this is a must-have item.
8. Write a theme song. After reading the chapter, write a short theme song for the main idea, problem, or person in the chapter. Using an existing song is O.K., as long as it fits with the reading. Students can sing, speak, or play their songs for the class.
9. Ask an adult. After the reading the chapter, talk about the material with an adult. What did the adult think of the chapter? What use did the adult have for the material?
10. What if? After reading the chapter, answer one of the following questions (4-5 sentences). What if the time were different? What if the people had more/less money or resources? What if the result were different?

I’m sure that you have many alternative assessments that you give your students instead of the read-and-respond homework assignments. What do you do to vary the homework that you assign?

Mime: On and off due to heavy workload Lighthelper / Darren felon on Flickr.com Creative Commons

But, grading class participation can be tedious. It’s also tough to make it fair. What makes good class participation and what is just merely warming a desk?

The Seating Chart Method. When I taught foreign language, our department kept track of participation points using a seating chart and clipboard. Each week, I’d have a seating chart grid with each student’s name and five spots to record participation. Students who were present earned one point (tardy students earned zero). Students who answered a question earned another point. Students who answered more than one question earned three points, which was the maximum point value for the day. Absent students could make up points with a short, memorized dialogue to be given in the hallway before or after class. Students with unexcused absences could not make up points.

The Exit Slip Method. Before students leave class for the day, they must complete a short exit slip. This could be two math problems or short answers to review questions from the lesson. I never used daily exit slips, but I occasionally gave them to my classes. My generic slip was a half sheet of paper, which I’d divided into quarters. One quadrant asked: Why is this lesson important?, another asked: What did you learn today?, the third asked: How will you use this information?, and the fourth asked: What further questions do you have?

The important part of the exit slip is to record the class’s responses. Students, like everyone else, want to know that their thoughts are important. I gave the slips a completion grade (four points – one for each question) and then compiled the interesting answers onto a transparency to display as students entered the classroom the next day. If I missed this sharing step, the students groused. If I missed this step, their answers on the next exit slip tended to be lousy.

To be fair to students with an excused absence, I averaged out the exit slip grades over the number of slips students turned in, not the number of possible exit slips and used the grade as a quiz grade in my grade book.

The question is: how do you evaluate class participation in a fair manner? Do you just give a point for showing up in class every day? Do you average out the points so grades for those students with an extended illness don’t plummet? Do you offer make-up points for this grade? Do you think that participation points can ever be fair? I’d love to hear about your methods and support/criticism of participation points in the comments.

Photo credits:
Untitled [rescue basket]: uscglantareapa / USCGLantAreaPA on Flickr.com Creative Commons
USACE employee helps students move into next phase of ‘Tin Can-Construction’ project: USACE Europe District / USACE Europe District on Flickr.com Creative Commons
eCybermission students visit Army laboratory: RDECOM / Research Development and Engineering Command on Flicr.com Creative Commons 

Beach balls are wonderful things. You can blow them up and, deflated, they store flat. If you puncture a beach ball, a small bit of duct tape will allow you to continue to use the ball, at least for a time. You can also repair them with vinyl repair kits (be careful not to stick two layers of the ball together).

Why all this talk about beach balls? They make for a wonderful review game and a great change of pace. Pull out the beach ball, start blowing it up and you’ll have a class full of engaged students.

Prepare the beach ball. Inflate the beach ball at home or during your planning period. Orient the ball with the small circles where the North and South Poles would be on a globe. Using a black permanent marker, draw an equator around the middle of your globe/beach ball.

Develop questions. In my beach ball’s Northern Hemisphere, I use the permanent marker to write question verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the Southern Hemisphere, I write words from our unit.

The game. Students bat the ball around and the third person to receive the ball must catch it with two hands. One hand will be the top hemisphere’s question and the other will be the word from the unit. You can change it up, of course, and have each person answer questions. You’ll need to figure out what to do about beach ball spikes and players who go to great lengths to avoid the beach ball. That can be part of your pre-game discussion.

Sample questions:
Generic literature (story map)

Northern Hemisphere: Summarize, List, Defend, Condemn, Describe, Identify
Southern Hemisphere: Theme, character, climax, resolution, conflict, setting

Of course, you can adapt this idea to almost any unit of study or any discipline. Math teachers can do an order of operations beach ball, Science teachers can review genetics. The balls are cheap enough that you could create a review for each unit of study or even have two balls in the air at once. Students could answer the questions as partners, from opposite sides of the room.

Have you used the beach ball review in your class? What might be some questions for the Northern and Southern hemispheres of the ball? What other review games have you used in your classroom?

Photo credits:
Beach balls floating on the pond before the Slush Cup: Alaskan Dude / Frank Kovalchek on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Beach Ball: KaCey97007 / Cindy Mc on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Liquid Heaven – With a ball: bratha / Andrew Braithwaite on Flickr.com Creative Commons

It’s kind of snarky, but I’m sure you’ve sat through staff meetings where you were guilty of watching the clock, grading papers, doodling, or making lists.

It’s the beginning of another school year and I bet you have at least a half day full of staff meetings – maybe several days. Man, that’s rough. What makes these days so painful and what takeaways do we have for our own teaching?

Staff Meeting Sin #1: We have better things to do.

At the meeting: It’s tough to hold a staff meeting when every teacher is drumming her fingers, looking at her watch, and making lists of things she really needs to be doing in her classroom. The teachers may be assembled in the Library Media Center, but their minds are on the new textbooks, putting up bulletin boards, and making sure they have all their photo copies. You don’t have them at hello, you have them at goodbye.

In the classroom: Sometimes it’s the same with our students. Ever try to give an important lecture the day of the Homecoming pep rally? Your whole class is wearing school colors and some are painted blue and white. This is not the day to lecture about the causes of World War II. You might as well harness all that fidgety energy in a meaningful way. I used to take my classes outside on Homecoming Friday to introduce the concept of stage fight choreography for my drama unit. Every calendar year contains a few of these crazy days: yearbook club photo day, the day before winter/spring break, the day before the state tournament, and the day before prom/Homecoming.

You could spend your life frustrated with the evils of modern high school education or you could put some mind power to harnessing your student’s energy for good – and have a little fun, too. Good suggestions for this are: educational review game that involves movement, a live demonstration of a physics concept, a live, participatory model of a math concept, a battle reenactment, or improvisational skits that fit a classroom objective. Get the students out of their seats, on their feet, and learning something novel to keep them from watching the clock, fidgeting, and not concentrating at all.

Staff Meeting Sin #2: No sense of time

At the meeting: I’ve been in staff meetings where I swear the clock’s hands have been moving backwards. I’d had too much coffee and there’s no restroom break in sight. My fellow teachers at my table were engaged and listening at the beginning of the meeting, but with no end in sight, they’ve started writing letters and making lists.

In the classroom: I have this really great lecture about Shakespeare, his life, the Globe, and the origins of his plays. Well, I think it’s great. Some of my students, though, think it’s way too long. They don’t care about Edward de Vere and the authorship question at all – can you imagine?

To stop my students from fidgeting when I talk about groundlings, I limit my lecture time to just 15 minutes and I assign a clock watcher to give me the three-minute signal, the one-minute signal, and the 10-second countdown. Of course, I schedule several 15-minute lessons over the course of a week so my freshmen can learn about the Elizabethan world view and the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet.

Staff Meeting Sin #3: Purposeless work

At the meeting: I’ve attended faculty meetings where the teachers form small groups and pore over student data. Then we complete a spreadsheet about the data. But, what does this have to do with how I’ll teach poetry? No idea.
When we finished, the administrator gathered up our work and our data and put it all in a box. Eighty people spent two hours filling out spreadsheets about that student data and I had the impression that no one would review our work. Since we didn’t report out to the group, I didn’t know what the results and conclusions were in the other groups, either. I felt like we’d all been used to satisfy some district requirement and that our work would stay in that box and live on a store room shelf. I left the meeting feeling unappreciated and empty.

In the classroom: Students really hate assignments that are just a check in the box, too. They don’t want to spend their time at home writing paragraphs you’ll never read or answering questions you’ll never discuss.

I know it’s not always possible to make homework fun. Sometimes homework is work. However, here are a few ideas I’ve used that work well to make it more interesting, at least.

Bring in an object from home that would have helped the story’s main character. Be prepared to explain why the object would be useful and how it would have changed the story’s resolution.

• Interview your parent to discover his or her opinion or experiences with the class’s topic.
• Locate an example of an indirect quote in the newspaper and be prepared to explain why the writer might have chosen to use an indirect quote instead of a direct quote.
• Create a joke and a punch line based on what we learned in class. (clean)
• What would this battle’s theme song be? (current radio hits, clean)
• What do you think the most important detail of this reading is and why?
• What might a Twitter exchange between these two scientists look like?

Staff Meeting Sin #4: No time for discussion or sharing

At the meeting:  I’ve joined my peers in the Library Media Center to listen to our principal talk about how no one follows the tardy policy. Then, in small groups, we discuss the tardy policy, its merits and flaws, and we discuss how to better enforce it and make sure everyone’s on the same page. But these great conversations go nowhere. No one records them, no one reports out to the group. Eighty smart people come up with great strategies, but there’s no change to the tardy policy and no change in enforcement.

In the classroom: Even if there’s very little time for discussion, your students love to hear what one another thinks. Here are some quick ways to share:

• As students enter the room, ask them to write one thing they learned from the previous night’s assignment. Keep the list for the unit review.
• As students exit the room, ask them to write down the biggest take away from class that day. Compile all answers and post on the interactive whiteboard for students to see as they enter. Keep the list for the unit review.
• Think. Pair. Share. It’s an oldie, but a goodie. Give students think time, pair them up, give them a minute to share ideas and pick the best one, then one person from each pair shares with the class.
• Work movement into the discussion. Ask students to line up along the wall. Move to the right if you agree with this statement and move to the left if you disagree. Allow the groups to have a minute to discuss and then request volunteers to defend their positions. It’s a good way to get kids out of their seats in a constructive way.

Staff Meeting Sin #5: No point

At the meeting: Your district administrator decides to start off the year with a metaphor for his vision of the school district. Every teacher sits in the auditorium to watch a clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey and sing a song together. The lights come back on and people look puzzled and are shaking their heads. At least I can go work in my room now, you think.

In the classroom: You have a great hands-on lesson where students toss a ball of string to one another and answer questions while they do it. The whole classroom and all of the students finish the exercise entwined in string. Once the students have cleaned up the mess and gathered up their things, the bell rings. As the students leave, you hear one kid say: what was that about? Someone responds: I’m not sure, but at least we don’t have homework.

Sometimes the objective gets lost in the activity, doesn’t it? I once had students build a scale model of the Globe Theatre. They were beautiful Popsicle stick sculptures, but pretty pointless. What did my students learn? Well, they learned about what theater looked like in Shakespeare’s day and they took a huge amount of time doing it.

Even though I kept one of those Globe Theatre models on top of my classroom closet, it was more a reminder for me to be sure that I met objectives than an objet d’art. I made sure from that point on that everything my students did met objectives and that all evaluations stemmed from those objectives. Sure, those models were amazing, but they weren’t a good use of my students’ time. I want my kids to leave the classroom saying I learned something rather than What was that about?

How about you? You’ve sat through faculty meetings. What can you learn from the meeting that bored you to tears? How can you avoid that mistake in your own classroom?

That first year in the classroom can be a really tough year and veteran teachers in my hall stopped by to give me bits of wisdom. Some advice was great, some was lousy. One gal told me to be myself. Yeah, well, myself wasn’t a teacher, so I didn’t know how to act. I didn’t know what worked for me and what just felt wrong.

Another teacher told me never to turn my back on my students. Can you imagine how crazy I would have looked if I tried to write on the chalkboard while facing my students? I couldn’t figure out how that would work, so I didn’t do that, either.

The best advice I’d received: You teach on your feet and plan on your seat.

 I’ve expanded this to mean that it’s good practice to circulate around the classroom and stop at students’ desks. Sitting behind your own desk isn’t the best place to be between bells.

Circulating among your studentswill give you better classroom management and you’ll be accessible to even the shiest kid. Don’t feel tied to the front of the room or your lectern. Develop ways to get out into the crowd instead.

The worst advice I’d received: Don’t smile until Christmas.

This advice is so common as to be a cliché. Over a dozen veteran teachers gave me this advice and I know many other teachers who’ve received it, too.

The logic behind not smiling is that students will take the new teacher seriously if she never smiles. The teacher and the students are in the classroom to work. Having fun just leads to disorder and noise. Better not to smile than to open the floodgates of chaotic fun.

Many new teachers aren’t much older than their students. If the new teacher doesn’t have the advantage of looking the part of a teacher, a serious expression will help bolster her authority. Some new teachers also make the mistake of befriending their students. Not smiling until Christmas makes it difficult for the new teacher to fall into this trap.

How to be taken seriously and smile, too

It truly is a good idea not to smile at some times during the day.  If you’re emphasizing how important it is for students to study for an exam, you’re probably not smiling. That’s O.K. The following cautions will help you to be taken seriously when you need to get your classroom discipline message across.

Do not give students mixed messages. Do not smile when you’re correcting or redirecting behavior. Stay neutral when discussing behavior. Later, smile as a reward for students who are behaving well.

Don’t play favorites. Nothing undermines your credibility like playing favorites. If the editor of the yearbook is passing notes, stop her. If your next-door-neighbor’s daughter is texting under her desk, stop her. If the smartest kid you’ve ever met lets a cuss word slip, remind him to correct his words. Students are watching what you do and how you react. There’s no way you’ll be able to stop your C-student from passing notes if she saw you let the editor’s behavior go unnoticed. These are all tests; make sure you pass.

Be consistent. If you hold a student’s cell phone until after class, you’d better be prepared to do the same thing for every student you catch texting. Don’t let the yearbook editor slide her phone into her backpack. If members of a work group are off-task and you separate them to work individually, be prepared to separate all off-task groups, even those that are accomplishing something.

Don’t punish a group for an individual’s mistake. If at all possible, handle discipline matters with individual students. Don’t hold a class after the bell for talking when everyone knows it was those kids in the back row – again. You’ll just build resentment.

Handle discipline in a quiet way. Don’t call out a student for her behavior in front of the whole class. If you’re circulating around the room, it should be easy to stop by her desk, squat down to her level, and have a quiet conversation about her rude remarks. Maintain student dignity and you’ll earn the students’ respect.

A genuine smile is never wrong

The teacher who told me to be myself in the classroom was right: don’t do things that feel unnatural. The students will see right through it. Smile when it feels natural. A sincere smile can be a form of praise or just a connection between you and the student.

In my job as editor of Inside the School, I’m lucky to meet some of the country’s top educators. Almost every time I meet one of these educators, a reoccurring theme crops up: teacher – student connections are very important to the learning process. If a teacher takes the time to get to know his students and enjoys the students as people, the students are more likely to try hard in that teacher’s class. The kids genuinely want to make the teacher proud.

So, I’m giving you permission to smile before Christmas. Try smiling before Labor Day, too. It makes you more approachable, makes your classroom a nice place to be, and improves your mood, too.

What do you think? Should teachers smile before Christmas? How about before Halloween? What’s the best piece of teaching advice you’ve received? What’s the worst? Please share in the comments.

Photo Credits:
The weather outside is frightful!: jessica.garro on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Have  a Holly Jolly Christmas: Lin Pernille ♥ Photography on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Gift Giver: makelessnoise on Flickr.com Crative Commons

That’s quite a compliment, isn’t it? I looked forward to his class every day.

Another teacher that I really loved was my college botany professor. He was multi-media teacher in an analog world. He illustrated every 60-minute lecture with slides that ran off of four slide projectors. It must have made his teaching assistants nuts. As a student, I loved it. He also demonstrated the objectives using plants we’d recognize. Once he showed us the proper way to brew tea and explained about how important the temperature was to brewing a pot of oolong that wasn’t bitter and had lots of caffeine. Another time he made Caesar salad with dressing from scratch to illustrate colloids. I never missed his class. 

Again, that’s a big compliment, isn’t it? I never missed his class.

My eighth grade algebra teacher had to spend a ton of time with me. I was on the math team, not because I was fabulous at solving equations, but because my dad thought I could use the extra practice. As an alternate, I wasn’t expected to compete, but when one of the real team members was in a bad accident just weeks before the first competition, my algebra teacher gave me the nod. He and the other team members tutored me for hours and told me that they believed I would succeed. And I did. It surprised all of us, I think. I never believed I could do math before. 

What a gift, hey? My teacher believed in me and I believed in myself.

School starts soon and it’s time to get our rooms in order and sent out the first packets for photocopying. While you’re planning and organizing, give some thought to what it would be like to be a student in your class. What compliments would your students give you?

Who was your favorite teacher? What did that person do to earn your respect? Let’s reminisce about the good ones and remind ourselves why we started teaching in the first place. 

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.

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