I Just Finished!!!

Okay, so I just finished grading. I came down to Vegas and what do I do? Grade papers for the first few hours I am here. Don't worry the purpose of the trip was not vacation, but to visit my grandma and she doesn't mind. She knows what it's like to be behind in grading. Plus there are no huge plans to visit the strip.

But to the point. I learned a bit from grading this time. First, I need to get faster. By the end though I was doing about one every ten minutes or fewer. So that was exciting. There were a few that still took more time because their prose killed me, but I made the last four in under an hour. Woohoo! Second I need to grade them closer together because when I got done I wasn't sure where to start with their grades! I put them in piles but I had to reread to figure out which piles to put them in. I couldn't remember how good or bad some of them were. Third I have to stop feeling sympathetic. There were about four or five that would have been a middle or low B but that I dropped down to C's because they didn't make the page length. Their arguments were pretty good, but they didn't start connecting until the last page so they didn't make the length and their paper wasn't quite there. It discouraged me and I had a hard time figuring out what to do with some of the papers. I was still a little concerned about the final numbers I put on there, because Dr. R said he gives few C's but I had a least six or seven C's. I think that's mainly because four of those didn't make the page length.

The emulation essay was tricky. Like the others I had a hard time not writing like my students. I felt like I had copied from them. Plus I spent forever trying to write on something they didn't write on so I wouldn't be confused by their arguments. I was stressed out about writing it because I kept worrying about the argument and did it do what I wanted to do? Did I fulfill the assignment? Then I worried about passive voice and sentence construction and my citations and everything. It was stressful. I am almost as scared as my students to get my paper back. That is if they even care. I've only had one student ask about them so far. Maybe I can keep them forever and they won't notice.... it's a thought.