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This Is Why Everyone Hates Grading
Grading my students’ final round of assignments has been a sorry mess. I’m not angry with my students for giving me wrong answers (which I respect) or writing about things that aren’t true (which I find amusing); I’m frustrated with them for being incredibly lazy. “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed” is the wrong type of vibe, because it’s more like I’m completely unable to understand where they’re coming from.
Before I begin, I should say that I’m sure there are some people reading this who might object to my assessment of my students as “lazy” in the face of a global pandemic, which has been – to put it mildly – disruptive to all of us. To these people I would say: You have not seen the assignments, you have not seen the students’ submissions, and you have not seen our communications. I’ve been working ten-hour days recently, and you’ll have to take my word for it that I have better things to do than to complain about nothing.
Stephen King used to teach college classes in the late 1970s. Imagine that you had Stephen King as your professor for a class about “Contemporary American Horror and Dark Fantasy.” This is an upper-level elective class, so no one is holding a gun against your head and forcing you to enroll. Stephen King is bringing all of his knowledge, energy, creativity, good humor, and weirdness to the class. He may not be famous yet, but he’s on his way up and already has a lot of connections. As a student in Stephen King’s class, you have Stephen King’s full attention.
So imagine you’re a student in Stephen King’s class – which, again, no one is forcing you to take – and you decide that, since Stephen King seems like a “nice” person, you’re going to put in the absolute minimum amount of effort.
Why in the world would you do that?
I’m not saying that I’m Stephen King, but Stephen King didn’t start out as “Stephen King” either. And this isn’t about “Do my students know who I am,” but rather, I teach popular classes with full enrollments and maxed-out waiting lists, and I have a reputation for using my connections to help my students get good paying internships, generous scholarships, and their dream jobs.
Like, can you imagine being a student who allocates basically all of your enrollment “points” to get a seat one of my classes, learning that the class has open assignments and flexible deadlines, and then deciding that it therefore isn’t your time and attention?
It could be that my classes are shit and aren’t worth the students’ time, but I don’t think that’s the case, especially since all of the metrics that have been used to evaluate my teaching indicate the opposite.
I’ve been putting an enormous amount of energy into my classes. Competent teaching isn’t rewarded by most American universities, and “above and beyond” teaching certainly isn’t. I’m making interesting, fair, and accessible classes for the sole benefit of the students, but the work I’m doing feels pointless if the students aren’t motivated to benefit from it. If I’m going to keep doing this, I need to be more efficient in persuading students to take me and my classes seriously.
The strange thing is that I’ve never had this problem before, and I honestly have no idea why my classes this academic year have been so difficult (even before everything went online for the last six weeks). What I want to say is that I got a reputation for being “easy” and have therefore started attracting a certain type of student, but who knows? Since there’s no way to account for external factors, the only thing I can change is my own behavior and attitude.
This is why I’m working on concrete strategies to be less “kind” and “accessible” in the future.
Before I begin, I should say that I’m sure there are some people reading this who might object to my assessment of my students as “lazy” in the face of a global pandemic, which has been – to put it mildly – disruptive to all of us. To these people I would say: You have not seen the assignments, you have not seen the students’ submissions, and you have not seen our communications. I’ve been working ten-hour days recently, and you’ll have to take my word for it that I have better things to do than to complain about nothing.
Stephen King used to teach college classes in the late 1970s. Imagine that you had Stephen King as your professor for a class about “Contemporary American Horror and Dark Fantasy.” This is an upper-level elective class, so no one is holding a gun against your head and forcing you to enroll. Stephen King is bringing all of his knowledge, energy, creativity, good humor, and weirdness to the class. He may not be famous yet, but he’s on his way up and already has a lot of connections. As a student in Stephen King’s class, you have Stephen King’s full attention.
So imagine you’re a student in Stephen King’s class – which, again, no one is forcing you to take – and you decide that, since Stephen King seems like a “nice” person, you’re going to put in the absolute minimum amount of effort.
Why in the world would you do that?
I’m not saying that I’m Stephen King, but Stephen King didn’t start out as “Stephen King” either. And this isn’t about “Do my students know who I am,” but rather, I teach popular classes with full enrollments and maxed-out waiting lists, and I have a reputation for using my connections to help my students get good paying internships, generous scholarships, and their dream jobs.
Like, can you imagine being a student who allocates basically all of your enrollment “points” to get a seat one of my classes, learning that the class has open assignments and flexible deadlines, and then deciding that it therefore isn’t your time and attention?
It could be that my classes are shit and aren’t worth the students’ time, but I don’t think that’s the case, especially since all of the metrics that have been used to evaluate my teaching indicate the opposite.
I’ve been putting an enormous amount of energy into my classes. Competent teaching isn’t rewarded by most American universities, and “above and beyond” teaching certainly isn’t. I’m making interesting, fair, and accessible classes for the sole benefit of the students, but the work I’m doing feels pointless if the students aren’t motivated to benefit from it. If I’m going to keep doing this, I need to be more efficient in persuading students to take me and my classes seriously.
The strange thing is that I’ve never had this problem before, and I honestly have no idea why my classes this academic year have been so difficult (even before everything went online for the last six weeks). What I want to say is that I got a reputation for being “easy” and have therefore started attracting a certain type of student, but who knows? Since there’s no way to account for external factors, the only thing I can change is my own behavior and attitude.
This is why I’m working on concrete strategies to be less “kind” and “accessible” in the future.