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Thursday, August 24, 2006

Starting Another Semester

Ninety-two students are enrolled in my classes for the fall semester. Just thinking of that number makes me incredibly tired because of the amount of essays that I’ll be grading. Probably the best thing about this time of the semester when my classes are just now underway, having been open and available since Sunday at midnight, is the relative peace before the influx of student essays. It’s possible to have a real life, that is, regular hours and sufficient amounts of sleep for these first few weeks.

I’m hoping to get most of my grading done during the day this semester. I’m also hoping to start the grading earlier because it has usually taken me a week before I can even begin to face the essays that I have to grade. Feelings of disappointment at the quality of the writing keep me from reading them with alacrity. It takes time to approach student essays with the ability to lend praise occasionally; the temptation when approaching them too soon is to identify the faulty mechanics and to find reasons for not giving them much attention, such as brevity, not fulfilling the assignment, plagiarism, and errors in documentation. Simply telling the student how awful his/her essay is is not teaching.

4 comments:

  1. Grading is the worst part. I've had students who seemed barely able to write a complete sentence tell me they always received A's in high school . . . It makes me want to go find their high school English teachers and shake them so hard I'll give them retrograde shaken-baby syndrome. But maybe that's just a Community College thing to have such bad writing.

    However, there's also a plus to community colleges: the non-traditional, adult students. Oh, they are a joy to teach. They're prepared for class, they engage in class discussions, ask good questions, make revisions, and - perhaps most importantly - write wonderful essays because they have actual, interesting life experiences to write about. The only time it's strange is when these older students use the honorific "Mister" with my last name. There's no way I can get away with being a "snooty" teach with them - when I have tried it, I'd get teased for being so much younger. They have been fearless that way.

    I'm going to miss that this semester. My class didn't have enough students to stay open.

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  2. Thanks for the comment, Quinn. I'm sorry to hear your class was cancelled. The adjunct life, as I mentioned to you before, is often a tenuous one. Some institutions make sincere efforts to keep their adjuncts employed. More steps need to be taken to ensure that part-timers receive a long-term contract. If the institution is worried about the quality of education provided its students, it stands to reason that there needs to be more done to assist part-timers in feeling a more permanent part of any one institution, particularly because part-timers teach so many of the classes offered.

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  3. At least you recognize that that's not teaching. There are so many teachers who would just read them and move on without taking the time to care whether they were any good or not. This is why I never got into teaching myself.

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  4. Rebecca--There actually has been a great deal of research in composition studies on the subject of error. Some scholars recommend ignoring the textual errors and addressing the areas of major concern like development and organization when grading an essay. Despite the research, many composition instructors believe that students need to demonstrate mastery of standard written English and any one essay deserves to fail if the errors are of a serious nature and if the errors are in abundance, say, three or more per page.

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