I’ll be keeping the final projects for all my classes on file, which means that I’ll be giving students a brief chance to look at them, and then reclaiming them. One thing I learned is that when students have only 10 minutes to check out their writing feedback, half that time is spent hunting for explanations of the grade, and half is spent comparing with others. They tend not to very intensely read my summarizing notes, but if they do, they read it more closely than all the little notes I make throughout the text.

So think I’m going to go easy on the feedback and save myself a headache. Anyone who wants more in-depth feedback can ask me about it. But I’m going to go easy on it today, as I launch into my second major round of grading.

UPDATE: It’s still have to stop myself from making complete feedback notes throughout the text, but I am finding that at least just circling the mistakes pertinent to things we’ve studied, and adding a few notes to things we haven’t that mar clarity seriously, and writing a short bit of feedback at the end has allowed me to up productivity to about 4-5 movie reviews an hour. By that count, I have about 3 more hours to go (before I finish grading this particular class.)

(That’s not counting entering the grades into the computer, copying attendance records over to a clean sheet, and so on. But still, I was doing 2-3 movie reviews an hour before, and the feedback seemed to be too much anyway. I want to offer useful feedback to these kids, since so many of them seem hungry for real pointers as to how to improve their writing, but… too much is too much, and as I keep advising them to know their limits and write what they can competently write, plus a little more, so too must I remember and recognize my own limits.)

Grading to come:

• around 15 final essays for my Advanced Composition course (around, because one student has stopped submitting work and I don’t know if she intends to complete the course)
• 15 final projects/presentations in my Media English course, some of which will NOT be essays but rather creative projects (including a radio interview, some series of advertisements, and a very interesting-sounding presentation on the subject of AIDS-prevention PSAs and what kind of approach would be most useful in South Korea)
• 11 more final presentations in my Public Speaking course, which are graded on the spot and which don’t require more than the filling-out of a form with some notes and grades assigned to different aspects of the speech… meaning, this class’s grading will be complete about ten minutes after the final speech is delivered.

Unfortunately, I also have to type up some feedback for speeches students made last week using visuals. I have scattered notes, and grades, and I trust myself on the grades I gave them, but I hope my notes have some useful points because I don’t necessarily trust my memory to produce typed feedback with very specific information.

Oh, and I have to resubmit the explanation for why I’ll be missing the last three days of semester yet again, because I included too much information last time. All I’m going to say is that the way the Department of Education seems to terrorize institutions is such that the whole system of recording attendance and other information has become inherently deceptive as a means of minimizing the government’s ability to pedantically threaten people for things that anyone with half a brain already knows are happening everywhere… like the fact people don’t book make-up classes for national holidays. One more thing I have to do yet again. One more source of stress, in other words.