re: Teacher Friend Posted This About Grading Papers

I've been an English teacher for almost 12 years, and the chart is definitely accurate in terms of total hours required to grade an essay if you do it correctly. Most English teachers don't though. It's embarrassing how subjective and anal retentive ELA teachers are when it comes to grading papers.

I ascribe to the Richard Straub philosophy on essay feedback: open dialogue through focused comments is key to developing student writers. That requires time. 5 minutes per essay is about what I take per student.

But the thing is, English doesn't necessarily need routine grades and certainly not ones that require extensive amounts of time to complete. With current technology (Google Forms for example), you can have 100+ assessments graded the second they hit submit. I imagine we're not too far away from Google Forms transferring directly into the electronic grade book cutting down even more time.

So let's say I have 100 papers or so to grade and need 8 hours. I tell my students to give me about two weeks to get them back.

That means I can have them finished in two weeks with less than an hour a day of grading. Probably less because there will be some who need less commentary and rarely those that will need more.

I assign two formal essays per semester. That's four weeks of focused grading.

The rest of the time is just regular shite that doesn't take a whole lot of time at all in terms of grading.

Teachers are the absolute worst whiners, and yes, I agree with the poster above: it's because it's a field dominated by women.