What If We Only Had To Respond To Student Work Without Having To Give It A Number and Grade?

It is definitely May because I'm looking at the massive amounts of student work and thinking, "This is impossible. There's no way to get through the volumes of papers being turned in."

But, I realized it is my nature to get through it all and to be very conscientious of the feedback I give. The thing I'm wrestling with this morning, however, is the nature of a semester reality, the lack of time with students, and the vast difference of teaching graduate school as opposed to high school (at least high school in Kentucky). I'm such a National Writing Project guy and best practices thinker. It is rather amazing to me that the norm in higher education is the one-shot, one grade ordeal of the end-of-the-semester high stakes assessment. It's the paper, the project and/or the exam.

The trouble I have with this end-of-the-semester blitz, is all the work comes in without ample time for revision. When a course is content-focused, much material is offered on a weekly basis, laying a foundation of what students will have to do for assessment in the end. An instructor (given a 15-week reality), can meet with students and coach them with ideas, but the work usually doesn't come in until the very end (with the University requires 72 hours to get the grades in). The result is the need for quick grading and not nurturing support for developing better writers.

The good student will turn work in early out of paranoia and then they can be coached to be a better communicator. The majority, however, will turn things in exactly when it is due.

In reality, knowledge and the flow of it between human being and human being is much more fluid and lifelong. The construction of semesters and terms, papers and projects, are somewhat silly and counterintuitive to living a life of asking questions, wondering, and finding solutions.

Ah, but it is what we have. What's my grade? What do I need to know? How do you score your students? All of this is irrelevant. The real test is life itself and how you carry everything in your satchel as you travel from experience to experience. Truth is, too, there is no letter given to your life. It's just the way one chooses to live.

And with that, I must get back to grading. It needs to get done.