balance, pt. 7: grading

When I first started teaching, I spent far too much of my time grading. I commonly teach about 100 students per semester, and if that doesn't seem like a lot, I'll point out that classes here are expected to be heavy on papers, essay exams, and activities, and we have no graduate student TAs to help us with the grading.

I like to get feedback to my students as soon as possible, and I want my feedback to be substantive and constructive. As a result, my first couple of years here I would frequently be snowed under by a pile of grading. Nothing else got done, of course, and frankly the results - as measured by the usefulness of my critiques to the students - were not worth the effort.

So, I tamed the grading beast. Here are a few pointers that worked for me and for my students. These are mostly no-brainers, but they took me a long time to figure out, so I thought I might as well share them. YMMV.

Grading rubrics. An oldie but goodie. When grading an essay, paper, or presentation, I pick the 4-8 most important aspects of the assignment, and I decide how many points each one should be worth. Then I create a column for each of those items in an Excel spreadsheet and put the grades in as I read each paper. Not only can I set it up so Excel automatically adds all the points together to create the final grade, but I can use mail merge to give each student a print-out of their grade break-down with comments.

For example, let's say I've assigned a paper on gorillas, and it is worth 50 points total. I may decide that spelling and punctuation are worth 5 points, grammar and style are 5 points, coverage of basic gorilla biology is 10 points, description of gorilla social organization is 10 points, coverage of gorilla diet is 10 points, and coverage of gorilla conservation is another 10. Obviously, these topics should correspond to the directions for the assignment that I gave to my students. I put together an Excel spreadsheet with each one of those categories as a separate column. As I read John Doe's paper, I put a number in each of those columns, and in the last column I write general comments. Mail merge can then create a Word file that can be printed and stapled to the papers to be returned to the students. More frequently, I copy and paste the relevant paragraph to the end of the student's electronically submitted paper and send it back to them. The file usually looks something like this, and only takes minutes to create for the whole class:

Paper 1: Gorillas
Doe, John

Spelling and punctuation (out of 5 points): 3
Grammar and style (out of 5 points): 4
Basic biology (out of 10 points): 8
Social organization (out of 10 points): 7
Diet (out of 10 points): 10
Conservation (out of 10 points): 6

Total points (out of 50): 38

Comments: Good job on this paper overall, John, but I'd like to see more detail in your discussion of gorilla conservation. I particularly liked your section on gorilla diet, but be careful of typos. I'm pretty sure you didn't mean that gorillas eat their chests.

The beauty of the system is that you've given feedback on where the student went wrong, (John now knows which parts of the paper were strong and which ones were weak), but you don't have to spell it out for him. If you want, you can always add another comments column by each grade, and add that to the mail merge. For example, the grade for spelling and punctuation could have the number, followed by the comment "Please watch for typos. They are very distracting!" I find this system much faster and easier than trying to decide on (and justify) an overall grade without breaking it down in this fashion.

Typical-paragraph comments. A friend of mine is an English professor, has taught one bizillion sections of Freshman Comp, and runs the Writing Tutorial Center at Tiny U. She put me onto the idea of only correcting one typical paragraph, rather than trying to correct grammar, spelling, and organization problems throughout a paper. This is an absolute God-send when one of your students is barely capable of writing a complete sentence, and frequently fails to reach even that mark. My friend maintains that it's the best way to teach students how to write (when paired with the requirement that they re-write one of their essays). If you correct every mistake a student makes, all they will do is go through and make the changes you pointed out to them. If, instead, you mark the major problems in one paragraph and tell them to change similar problems in the rest of the paper, then they have to truly understand your corrections. As a bonus, it takes a lot less of your time!

Pick your battles. This is another tip from my friend the English professor: don't try to fix everything. Whether the paper is excellent or excruciating, pick no more than three problems for the student to fix. Those three things may be the details that turn a good paper into a great one, or they may be things like "try outlining your paper to improve organization", "please craft a legitimate thesis statement", and "for the love of all that is Holy, learn how to write a complete sentence!" It can be tempting to try to fix all of a student's problems, but if you dump all over a paper, the criticism will just be overwhelming. I don't mean that in a touchy-feely, don't-damage-their-poor-little-psychies-by-using-a-red-pen kind of way. What I mean is that too many problems to fix will lead to no problems being fixed. Many students will just give up. It's just not possible to overcome the failure of 12 years of pre-college education in the two weeks before the next paper is due. But if you give them two or three specific tasks to accomplish, they can master those before moving on.

The internet is your friend. I have created an on-line component to all of my introductory classes. Pre-labs, reading quizzes, exams, and activities can all be put on-line using a Moodle or Blackboard system. The initial set-up is a bear, but once they are up and running, many of these activities can be automatically graded by the computer and the grades put in the student's online grade book. Presto - no more grading! Obviously, cheating is easier under this system, but I've moved toward open book and open note exams, with the result that average grades have actually dropped! Why? Partly because students think they don't have to study if it's open book, but also because I can skip a lot of the easy questions and focus on questions that really test comprehension of the basic class concepts. (Yes, it is possible to test comprehension using multiple choice and matching questions.)

An added bonus of creating an on-line component to your class is that students can upload their papers and written assignments to the class web-page, which allows you to request electronic manuscripts without having your e-mail box fill up. The papers are conveniently located in one area on-line, and you won't have to hear any more excuses about failed e-mails.

visiting scholar conference 2011

Southern Illinois Carbondale's annual Visiting Scholar conference will be on "Narratives of North American Diversity, 1400-1700", with a focus on indigenous and slave experiences of that transformative period, independent or and/or interwoven with European perspectives. It looks like an interesting conference, and if I were in the area, I would definitely attend, although it is well outside my personal research interests.

Actually, that's not completely true. I have a deep interest in the adoption of Old World domestic animals by Native Americans. There are so many interesting stories out there - everything from simple adoption of herding, to the hunting of feral domesticates, to pigs as the cause of the Pequot war, to attempts to create Lapp-like reindeer domestication with Inuit and caribou. Some day, when I've actually written up all the extraneous data from my own research that I still have floating around, I'd love to start research on the movement of Old World domesticates in the New World. I'm not holding my breath until I have time, though.

Abstracts are due December 20, for anyone with an interest in the topic.

british nagpra?

This article has a very interesting discussion of a relatively new mandate in the UK requiring that all excavated human remains be reburied within two years. Apparently, the regulation of archaeology was transferred to the Ministry of Justice in 2008 (the article doesn't say why). The Ministry decided that archaeologists should be subject to a Victorian-era law that covered the excavation of old graveyards during suburban development.

I've written before about my strong views on NAGPRA; I'm not generally opposed to quick reburial for human remains. That said, I fail to see the purpose for this mandate. I may be wrong (please correct me if I am), but I'm not aware that Britian has a significant problem with power differential between those-that-dig and those-that-are-studied. Perhaps most archaeologists are ethnically English, and they're running roughshod over the pasts of the Welsh, Scotts, and Irish, but I've never gotten that impression. So what is the purpose of the law? Have there been any actual complaints from local communities?

weekly accountability: Oct. 10-16

My writing goals for this week were to re-do the data graphs and tables, and to re-write the body of the conference paper that I'm turning into a journal article.

I did not meet my writing goals; I only got about half of it done. As I mentioned in my last post, things fell apart around here the last two weeks (topped off by another doctor's visit this morning and another course of antibiotics, this time for Bunny). I'm just glad I got anything done! As an example of the power of clean living and high thinking, however, yesterday the deadline for this article was extended, so I'm not in as much of a rush as I thought.

My goals for next week are to finish the body of the paper and begin on the conclusions.

balance, pt. 6: losing it

I've been sick since early September. First it was a cold, then it became a secondary infection, then a sinus infection so intense I couldn't move my head without throwing up. Meantime, Little Boo had an ear infection and Dr. Mr. Palimpsest had a cold. We were muddling along alright, until Dr. Mr. Palimpsest caught the flu, and then gave it to our daughter, Bunny. This just happened to coincide with the move-my-head-and-puke phase of my own illness, so everything pretty much went to hell in a handbasket for a while.

Just as many middle-class families are one paycheck from poverty, so are most professional women one set-back away from total chaos. I was never more aware of how precarious is our family balancing act until it was disrupted so radically by a simple illness. But, there we were: our house filling with trash (mostly used tissues), our laundry piling up, our meals going uncooked, and our classes barely getting taught. I didn't do a writing accountability update last weekend because I got absolutely nothing done the week before. I'm lucky I didn't have to cancel classes. This week, it's taken me until today to get caught up and return to a normal routine, a process that was not helped by Bunny staying home for two days from preschool because of the flu.

It's been a tough time, but strangely enough, the last two weeks have made me incredibly grateful for all that I have. I am grateful for the help I receive from my husband (when he's not bedridden). I am grateful for those productive moments of peace in the office when the kids are at daycare. I am grateful for the energy I have (when I don't feel like death on toast) to get stuff done, day after day.

Thank God for a return to balance!

weekly accountability: Sept. 26-Oct. 2

My writing goals for this week were to re-write the introduction and background sections of the conference paper that I'm turning into a journal article.

I did meet my writing goals this week, more or less. I have a rough draft of the introduction and I have all of the sample/site descriptions written. This section of the article will need more editing than I like, but the draft is done. I'm honestly surprised I managed to meet my goals this week, since I lost two days to incipient pneumonia. Bleck!

My goals for next week are to re-do the data graphs and tables, and to re-write the body of the conference paper that I'm turning into a journal article.

balance, pt. 5: cleaning house

I said in my first post about life balance that I hate cutting from my to-do list, because I love everything I do. That's not 100% accurate. There is one thing that I really don't enjoy at all: cleaning the house.

I'm not a hyper-clean person under the best of conditions, and long work hours and two small kids are not the best of conditions. Still, I have some standards, low as they are. I know the clean-as-you-go method is the best, but I've never managed to pull that off. Dr. Mr. Palimpsest and I tried a designated a clean-up day (Saturday morning), but too often something else interfered and we were left with a filthy house.

My current system is working fairly well, within limits. I designate the cleaning of certain rooms to particular parts of my daily routine. For example, while I'm helping Bunny to brush her teeth and change into pajamas, I do a quick pick-up of the bathroom, her bedroom, and the playroom (which is conveniently located in-between). Similarly, when I feed our two cats (Orangey and The Brain), I also pick up the mud room and take out the compost (both located near the cat box.) Theoretically, I truly clean these rooms on the weekends (mop, vacuum, scrub, etc.), but that doesn't happen as often as it should.

This system works well for every room except the kitchen, which is the room that gets the dirtiest, and therefore just takes too long to clean. It can't be delegated to a quick pick-up in the middle of some other daily task. Once Little Boo is old enough to amuse himself, I'm sure it will be easier to find the time. Until then, does anyone have suggestions for keeping the kitchen clean?