Grading on a snowy evening

By Cindy Reitzi

Whose words these are I think I know.
His name's not on the paper though;
He will not see me grading here
Or watch my own frustration grow.
My little cats must think it queer
On their couch, these pages near
This grading ritual to make
The darkest evening of the year.
I give my muddled head a shake
To try to force myself awake.
Through the tortured syntax I creep,
Oh, please, not another mistake.
Unmarked essays stare dark and deep
Taller still than the graded heap,
And piles to go before I sleep
And piles to go before I sleep.

Grading high school essays inspires literary images for some teachers. For me, it conjures up Sisyphus, the representative myth of the endless, eternal cycle. Sisyphus heaves a boulder up a mountain, just to have it roll back down again. Then he starts over. Grading papers is like rolling the rock up the mountain. Just when you're done, there's always another pile waiting, in an endless, eternal cycle.

So, how many papers and pages are we really talking about? Typically, high school teachers teach five classes. Let's say, for the sake of argument, an English teacher has two sections of a semester-long writing class.

With current budget constraints, classes will likely have 30 students per section. A typical semester is approximately 18 weeks long. Let's say you assign seven two-page papers (about one every two weeks) plus a five-page research paper with all the trimmings: bibliography, foot- or endnotes, parenthetical citation, paraphrasing vs. quoting, lectures on plagiarism, etc. Not including the research "trimmings," you'll have 19 pages of text per student to grade. Multiply 60 students times 19 pages and you'll be grading, conservatively, 1,140 pages per semester for just two classes. (Of course, the "overachievers" will write more, the "underachievers" less or not at all, but it probably averages out.) Your other three classes will have yet more papers and grading, although not as relentlessly mountainous as with writing classes.

Now, let's say you get a batch of 60 short papers. How long will they take, provided you're an "efficient" grader (whatever that means)? On a straightforward two-pager with few errors plus written comments, personally, I think 15 minutes per paper is fast. So, optimistically, if all 60 took you 15 minutes apiece (which they never do) you will spend 15 hours grading two classes of "easy" papers.

At this rate, seven batches of two-page papers will take 105 hours to grade. Of course, if you're slower like me, it could take more like 20 minutes per paper, thus 20 hours per batch and 140 hours for all seven batches. The research paper will take you at least twice as long at 30 minutes, so tack on an additional 30 hours. All told, a "fast" grader will spend 135 hours per semester, a "slowpoke" more like 170 hours grading papers for just two classes.

Bear in mind, these estimates are only if you are a machine, since human beings get fatigued. Plus, you will always hit those snag papers. You're sailing along at a nice clip, finishing each paper as the kitchen timer dings your time allotment, when your schooner hits a coral reef. Suddenly, you are mired on a crusty obstruction of invented spellings, pretend punctuation, and science fiction syntax, forced to extricate your bark from this morass and begin smooth sailing again.

Along with the fact that 135 to 170 hours of grading doesn't include grading your other three classes, prepping or conducting your five classes, going to meetings and inservices, copying off materials for class, helping students outside of class, advising extracurriculars, and the thousand other things teachers do without benefit of a secretary or personal assistant to coordinate it all, the real kicker is that these 135 to 170 hours are free, donated labor outside of regular business hours, since there's no way all this grading will get done between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on a school day if you want to finish it by the end of the semester. Circumstances like these make some English teachers wish they were paid by the hour.

It's not that I don't like reading my students' writing. I do. It's that by the end of a given semester, I've passed judgment on a thousand pages of writing only to hear an individual ask, "Why did I get a C?" Usually I don't know why, in the moment, because I've just graded hundreds of pages and some of them start to blend together after awhile.

But like Belgian chocolates, every once in awhile you get these momentary guilty pleasures, savoring a well-written, insightful paper or a sudden breakthrough of a struggling student. Unfortunately, grading mountains of papers just sort of takes the charm right out of it.

March 8, 2006