Comment Stampers (Discourse Chronicle)
Comments(5) [I contemplate about whether or not having stampers with our frequently used comments on them such as “Comma splice – move clause and revise sentence” or “Pronoun disagreement” is more efficient than writing those out each time, but then our students may not be able to tell how much energy is invested into reading and commenting on papers.
A student forgot to pick up his homework from my stack along with his rough draft a few weeks ago because he said “it wasn’t green enough” referring to how much I dig into them. I only dig hard on rough drafts because a chance (albeit a small one) exists for my students to work on problems in revision, rather than no chance if I dig into final drafts since our students do not receive opportunities to revise once we complete a paper assignment.
I remember commenting on papers when I mentored as an undergraduate under Dennis G. Jerz with his freshman composition students and learning how to plow through papers thoroughly, yet efficiently. Efficiency equated to a total of six hours working with 30 papers, but four years later, my best is three hours with 24 papers. However, each new paper assignment seems to introduce other pitfalls for composition students to fall into along with common errors from previous work. BK]
category: Life, Pedagogy, Rhetoric and Poetics
Only 3 hours for 24 papers? How long are the papers? Because I usually take 5-6 hours for a stack of 23, at 3-5 pages each…
Teach me your mad grading skillz.
Signe, our student paper lengths are about the same for students. I should say that I read rough drafts and dig hard into those first.
Reading and digging into drafts seems like a waste of time to some of my colleagues, but I do it because then a chance (albeit a small one) exists that my comments may not fall into the ether. I notice that working with drafts as a class helps me teach meaningful lessons addressing problems most of my students face.
I usually keep a common set of composition problems on my mind as I read such as: flow, organization, and structure. However, beyond my common set, I also keep in mind what pitfalls the paper assignment itself introduces and comment on those along the way as well as in my endnote.
Remember I said my best time is 3 hours for 24 papers. I average 4 hours for 12 papers, so a stack usually takes two sittings for me to get through. I hope that helps!