I have been searching all of my days

-Alexi Murdoch

I just spent my last weekend of Student Teaching grading all kinds of assignments. I find the process of grading to be one of the most frustrating and detrimental to my relationships with my students. I get frustrated by the work they turn in and it kind of affects the way I think about them, which I hate.

Most recently I began grading their book long character lists for "The Jungle." What is hard about grading this assignment is that I realize now that it isn't a very good assignment. How do you grade something that you realize is not a good assignment? It is difficult because I know that I am in danger of being too lenient in my grading or potentially too harsh--considering that many of them copied or paraphrased the character biographies provided on book rags.com or sparknotes. I have come up with a way to grade that is decently fair focusing more on those students who put the time and effort into the assignment to begin with; and overall, it did accomplish what I wanted it too because I do believe that this helped increase their test scores since they were forced to go through the novel for a second or potentially third time.

The assignment itself was given at the beginning of the unit, when we began reading the novel, and should not have been to extremely difficult if they had kept up with the assignment throughout reading the novel. But of course nove of them did so the project became significantly more difficult. In addition, what I decided to grade them on created a great deal of work for me too, which is also why I will never assign this exact project again. I wish I had been able to tweak it at the beginning because I like aspects of the assignment, but I was not able to look into the future and realize what I should fix about it before I assigned it.

Oh and I cannot sleep. I just want to get this over with, but I know that once I am done I am going to miss my students like crazy, figure that one out for me.