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[quote=Anonymous]I used to be a high school English teacher.  I was great at classroom instruction.  I planned engaging lessons and meaningful projects.  I connected with students.  I connected students with books they loved.  I had classes with students with challenging behavioral histories and never once had to send a kid to the office.  By almost every measure, I was a great teacher.

But it was impossible, impossible, to keep up with grading.  I had 130-150 students in 5 classes.  If I spent ONE minute on each student’s writing once a day, that’s at least 2.5 hours of grading.  But even reading a couple of journal entries and putting a check on then took more that 1 minute per kid.

So let’s say I assigned just one essay a week and spent just 3 minutes reading and responding to each kid.  That is at least SEVEN hours of work for just ONE assignment.

That’s 7 hours of work on top of a full day of working.  That doesn’t include actually planning any lessons, reading journals, responding to parents, or working on anything assigned by my department chair or for one of the zillion committees I had to be on.

Every weekend I was spending 8-20 hours grading, just to keep up.

I read every journal article, every book, every blog I possibly could about efficient and most effective paper grading.  I tried everything.

It is impossible.  It is impossible to keep up.  Impossible to read and respond to everything.  I had many, many parents complaining.  I fell into terrible depressions and eventually quit.

20 years later, im FB friends with SO many of my former students who have found me.  It is gratifying that so many say I was their best teacher and can feel me so much of what they remember from classes.  So many kids say I changed their lives, made them feel seen, gave them hope, challenged them, inspired them.

I thought I was such a terrible teacher because I could not keep up with grading.  My entire identity was that I was a failure as a teacher.

But I was not a failure.  I focused on what matters.  I wish I could go back and take all that pressure off myself.  No one becomes a great writer from margin notes.  It did not matter worth 8-20 hours a week of my life I can never get back.

But on behalf of hardworking high school teachers everywhere....FFS.  Is this really that terrible?  [/quote]

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