Ask any teacher if they stay up until 11:00 p.m., 12:00 a.m. or 1:00 a.m. to craft dynamic, creative, exciting lessons. Are the late hours devoted to improving cutting edge teaching skills?
Of course not. The late-night tedium involves grappling with the "paper-grading ogre."
But, this is as it should be. When a teacher has been awake for 18, 19, or 20 hours; squeezing a day and a half of work into their waking hours; their brains and nervous systems flop, go limp. Creativity and thinking go flabby and flaccid. So, teachers staggering in this state of mind don't have the energy, attention span or patience to produce anything that is creative or useful.
A "numb mind" fits congruently with a "mind-numbing" activity such as grading papers.
Urgent, but Unimportant
Teachers cling to the fiction that grades and grading provide a certain magic importance in education. Supporting this error in judgment requires a convoluted logic, similar to the one that teachers fabricate when they delude themselves about the benefits of homework.
Sidebar
For an elaboration concerning the fallacy that homework drives leaning , see the Classroom Toolkit article, Homework: Some Suggestions for Solving a Recalcitrant, Intractable Problem
The issue that teachers face is that grading is an urgent, but unimportant (to learning) activity.
So, why do teachers devote so much time to an enterprise that provides so little value or payback?
Grading is urgent because student rebel if the quiz, test, project, report, paper that they completed (copied, wrote, shared, fudged, studied for) are summarily trashed by their teacher.
Of course, most students would never discover that their work (papers, quizzes, exams, assignments) received a summary execution in the dust bin.
Unfortunately, teachers encounter an isolated, grade-motivated student that is smart enough to calculate grade averages. A student of this ilk can only make trouble for a teachers.
Grades as Parents' Complaint Repellent
Teachers are driven to perform the "grading ritual" to exacting standards to head off parents' complaints (or to ward off the threat of parents' complaints), or to to mollify a campus principal's fear of parent complaints. So, teachers perpetuate this elaborate ruse under the guise of:
- Fairness
- Equality
- Competition
- Pseudo-Science (Statistics)
- Motivation toward Excellence
- No-cost (on the cheap, no money out of their pockets) Students' Rewards
So, what is a teacher to do?
A Motivational (Grading?) System
Factors that drive this convoluted state of interference with instruction (grading) can be "fixed" to make the system sane and sensible.
But, why bother to fix a broken, lame, anti-goal-achieveing process? Why not just throw the entire mess out?
Answer: Because you want to keep your job.
So, if teachers have to continue spending (investing, wasting) inordinate chunks of time on a less than useful process (only one of many distractions, wouldn't it be useful if there were some instructional payoff and measurable learning outcome resulting from the effort?
Sidebar
Classroom Toolkit has coined the term "Districtions" to refer to the "district's distracting restrictions" that school districts place as roadblocks to efficient and streamlined instruction. Remember: You read it here, first!
It would be wonderful if grades motivated many more students. Of course it would be wonderful if our teen-age children ate nutritious food, followed our advice and cleaned their rooms. It would also be wonderful if there was a magic pill that prevented a teacher's sedentary lifestyle from solidifying into cellulite. But, these are bouts of wishful thinking and fantasy. Human nature drives our students, teenagers and body fat in other directions.
So, let's adjust the current system to increase student motivation. And, let's not make a big deal about it. Remember, we want to appear to conform to all school district policies, no matter how inane a(or stupid) because conformity correlates with job security.
Here are some adjustments that may salvage the grading system for you…
- Give additional tests (or quizzes), and drop the lowest single grade
- Allow just about any student-initiated project to be applied as "extra credit" to class grades
- Conduct pre-test briefing sessions (disguised tutoring), and let a few test items "slip out." This strategy really gets students to pay attention
- Allow students to earn extra points by bringing in just about anything that is related to class instruction
- Allow students to earn points that can be applied toward their grades by re-writing or re-doing parts of the test that they missed
Creative adjustments to the grading system can be considered "playing loose" and "wheeling and dealing." But, who will complain if students are motivated, and rewarded for re-doing assignments, for creating self-directed projects, for taking initiative to "bring up their grades?"
Listen to teacher talk in Teacher Lounges across the country, and you will discover that teachers already know that the current grading system fails to motivate most (actually a super-majority or more) students.
Isn't it time to adjust the system to take advantage of our students' human nature?
And, it is "frosting on the cake" if the revamped system allows the use of rubrics that enable holistic scoring so that a teacher spend minutes instead of hours with the grading chores.
The communication and the relationship between teacher and students also creates benefits because teachers shows students that they want to help. With most current grading schemes, teachers appear to be stingy, hard-hearted, punitive task masters that dole out high grades as if they were scarce, or as if by assigning high grades, the teacher was robbing food from their children's plates.
However, since high grades don't cost a teacher any more than low grades (actually low grades do cost more to assign), everyone's best interest is served when teachers offer ethical, learning-based alternatives for students to earn (and pocket) better grades.
Try creative ways to get students to "up their grades" and see if this method works for you.
