Reply to We’ve had 13 days of school. How’s the new grading policy going?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am a professor and I've also taught at the high school level.

Ten day turnaround is entirely reasonable. You have to grade them at some point. Why not grade them in a timely fashion so that the student can benefit from the feedback?[/quote]

Can you recommend a way to do that?

Let’s say you have 150 essays. Each will take 15 minutes to score. That’s 37.5 sustained hours of grading for that assignment alone.

If you divide the work by 10 days, including weekends, you are adding 3.75 hours of work to each day. If you give yourself the weekend off, you’re adding 4.7 hours of work to each work day.

You have one planning period. Maybe you can get 40 minutes of grading in.

And that’s just for that one assignment. That doesn’t include emails, data, meetings, planning lessons, meeting with students, running clubs, other assignments, or other duties as assigned.

So, considering the circumstances, can you offer a recommendation? How did you get this done in 10 days? [/quote]

Well said. [/quote]

So, ah, do you guys just NOT GRADE THE PAPERS AT ALL?

You have to grade the papers at some point. It's not like waiting helps!

Explain how letting the work get backed up helps. When DO you grade it? It's not like they give you guys weeks off to grade.[/quote]

Well, I’ll be honest: most of us think it’s unreasonable to give up all of our off-hours to a job. We have families and other obligations.

If schools think grading is important (which it is), then time would be provided during the work week for it. If I have to choose between grading papers and taking care of my family, my family will always win. And that’s as it should be.

I would NEVER tell a person in another profession that their nights and weekends belong to me, that I expect them to put their job first. I would tell them to get another job, one that respects them.

And for all the “MCPS is full” comments: schools are scrambling to find martyrs now, and the door is ever-revolving as people try for a year and realize the job can be miserable. If your goal is just putting a warm body in each classroom, that can be done. If your goal is to put a successful, impactful teacher in each classroom, that can’t.

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Then, find a different way to assign work so you can more easily grade it or find a new job given you are unhappy.  Most jobs require weekends and evenings now.  It sucks but its how it is.[/quote]

What other jobs require almost 24/7 effort from an employee to complete tasks?  Is this something you are going to roll over and accept? This is why unions were created. Let’s not revisit history please.   [/quote]

Many service professions such as trades and public safety require employees to be on call essentially 24/7 during assigned blocks.  Before I became a teacher, I spent 2 years working as a plumber and I cannot tell you the number of personal plans I had to cancel and/or avoid scheduling in the first place to make this happen.

When fellow teachers claim that nobody else has to give up their personal and family lives to do the job it immediately points out how sheltered that individual really is.[/quote]

But teachers AREN’T saying that other professions have easy work weeks. They ARE saying teachers’ off hours are a factor when discussing timely grading. I’ve been following this thread closely. Two posts have claimed that teachers said they work harder, but I haven’t seen a teacher actually say that.

My DH is in public safety. Yes, he works overtime. It’s almost always by choice and he gets paid time and a half. My cousin works in an on-call trade. Yes, he misses out on occasional family activities, but he gets paid for that work.

So while I respect your argument that other professions work off hours, I’m not sure your two examples are good ones if you are attempting to illustrate regular, unpaid, evening work. [/quote]

Then, don't assign work.  Simple.  Why assign work if you will not grade it?[/quote]

Sigh. Nobody is saying they won’t grade work. Let’s stop making things up. That isn’t productive or useful.

Teachers are simply saying that grading has to be done during their evenings or weekends. There’s no time during their work day to grade, so schools are relying on teachers giving up their private time to get a mandatory part of their jobs done. Let me say that again: It is mandatory, yet very little (if any) paid work hours are devoted to it. The system relies on unpaid work, forcing teachers to decide between their families and stacks of papers.

Teachers are merely presenting the problem. Some of us are solving it by quitting in an effort to preserve our own families and other obligations. Some of us are solving it by refusing to do the extras tacked on to our days, like college recommendation letters. NOBODY is saying they are refusing to grade.[/quote]

We had a teacher last year simply not grade.  The principal didn't seem to care.  She would have bene my child's teacher again this year and she was such a nightmare we refused the class despite the guidance counselor pushing it.[/quote]

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