Making the grade

I have 13 more personal narratives to grade today.

Let me be clear: I detest grading papers. It's probably the thing I hate most about teaching.

The big assignment this trimester is a personal narrative. Students spend about four weeks reading examples of narratives, along with To Kill a Mockingbird. We discuss the elements that make for quality writing (strong verbs; plot structure; varying sentence structure; grammar/punctuation; etc.) ... and then the students try to apply all of these items.

Now, I firmly believe that you either have the writing gift or you don't. It's like anything else (sports, music): you can get better, but to be really good, you not only have to work at it, you have to have natural skill. For instance, when I was younger, I could have practiced basketball for hours every day. Even if I had, ain't no DI school gonna be callin' my name, youknowwhatI'msayin'?

So, right now, I'm slogging through 80 personal narratives. They average 6 pages each. It takes me about 20 minutes to grade each one. This means 3 an hour, which means 25-30 hours of grading.

I just graded my 7th one of the day. I told myself at the beginning of the day that I'd grade 20. It's now 5:15 p.m.

Some of the narratives are very good - extremely enjoyable to read, in fact. Others? Not so much. Perhaps if I find some particularly egregious writing, I'll share it with you.

And, in the time it took me to post this, I could've had another one graded.

Can opener.