Love Teaching, Hate Grading

The thrilling parts of my profession are planning and developing a lesson or unit and implementing it. I actually enjoy curriculum mapping and creating lessons. I enjoy setting up labs in the lab room, even though it takes a lot of time. I like measuring out the materials and dividing them into sets of 10 and preparing the chemicals, the seeds, or whatever - of course I hate the clean up. I love teaching a lesson when students are engaged in class - whether it's a lab, a project, or even a discussion/lecture. I love talking to small groups of students after school about a concept they are having trouble with. I even like preparing PowerPoint presentations, even though it takes me forever to finish one.

I hate grading papers. I know I don't assign enough writing activities to my students, but marking even just 90 student writing assignments (that's how many I teach this year) borders on torture - and if ever there were an argument for smaller class sizes and reduced teaching load in terms of total number of students served, reading student writing and giving meaningful feedback to help them improve their writing skills is it.

Based on the work I receive (written reports on exit projects, e.g.), the process of writing must be as painful to the students as the correcting process is for me. Even without the basic grammar & spelling problems, their thoughts are a tangled mess of knotted and twisted logic. The ideas are out of sequence, the point of many sentences is unclear, the idea may be clear but isn't really relevant to the topic, the major topic they are supposed to address is nowhere to be found - And I have to try to give comments that convey these deficiencies. I try to give positive comments as well, obviously, but sometimes that's nearly impossible except to note that they did a good job of starting sentences with capital letters and ending them with a period. I suppose that's worth something, but we are talking here about an accelerated grade 8 regents class!

So as I sit here this Memorial Day weekend going cross-eyed, I dreamed up an idea for a program to provide one-on-one tutoring for students who need help with writing. The idea came to me as I was editing a couple of papers that were submitted to me via e-mail by a couple of students. I decided to try editing in MSword - which I had never done before - and sending the edited papers back to the students via e-mail. It was surprisingly easy, and for someone like me with remarkably poor penmanship, the added bonus is that the students will actually be able to read my comments. And I thought, what if I could get some local college students to volunteer (or write a grant & pay them) to do this with students? A minimal amount of training would be necessary, and the volunteers would help students through several drafts of one major writing assignment. Almost all of the contact would be through e-mail, except perhaps for an initial meeting and an end of the year expo or something to celebrate their work.

Now, I know that there are models out there for students to help each other through peer editing and whatnot, but I frankly don't want to spend science class time having students edit each other's writing on a formal assignment such as an exit project. And I wonder how effective that strategy can be in a science class, where everyone may be struggling with the content understanding. Would the students even be able to formulate questions to guide their peers to express an idea more clearly? Would they be able to recognize when a process is completely out of sequence, or that a sentence is totally off-topic? I'm pessimistic on these questions, but then again I haven't really tried the strategy.

I still think back to my own experience with writing, which you may have noticed doesn't come naturally. I was in grad school faced with writing an 80-page master's thesis. I had always found writing even 5-page papers a struggle, and here was this monumental task in front of me. I couldn't have done it without the help of my wife, who was my full time editor, proofreader, & critic throughout the entire process, draft after draft. That's how I learned to write. It is still a struggle, but at least I know what I need to do. Whether I actually take the time to do it is another story.

Writing a full-fledged lab report must be a similarly daunting assignment for our students, and yet they get little support for the writing process. I think I'll look into this idea a little more.

Update

Somewhat on-topic, a NY Times piece today criticizes the new essay portion of the SAT. Relevant because it shows the new importance of writing skills for students today, the article criticizes the approach, which apparently values Bill O'Reilly style certainty over studied analysis & consideration of opposing viewpoints.