I’ll be student teaching (my content area is English) next semester; pretty much all of my professors have warned us against assigning several massive papers during the course of a semester.
Instead, they suggest that we assign shorter assignments that are still meaningful for purposes of assessment; that way, we don’t have to read 120 novels over the course of a weekend, but we can still ascertain whether our educational objectives have been met.
Wish I had been warned about that. Then again the University I go to thinks that classroom management is best “learned only in Internship” so we get no prior training in that area 
Most teachers I think agree that this is the most important area of focus as with no classroom management nothing gets done.
Well reading the posts on this page makes me feel better as an intern! I’ve made some mistakes, though most were due to my genetic inheritance of being disorganized. I’ve never not read through a student’s paper or assignment! Maybe there is still hope for me.
I think it is important for parents and teachers to make their offspring/students aware they should always ask why they got the mark they got. Like any other organization, the school system isn’t perfect.
I’m teaching Earth Science and Chemistry. Every day the ES kids complete some worksheet or questions or writeup. I’m supposed to spend even one minute on every paper from 130 kids? What planet are you on?
Absolutely. Thats 2 - 3 hours. Did you think teaching was a 9:00 to 3:00 job???
Besides, there are a lot of ways to deal with this; it depends on the nature of the assignment. Sometimes, for example, you can spend 5 minutes at the beginning of class having them trade papers and go over the answers as a group, and mark each other’s papers. Check off who did and didn’t do the assignment (no need to compute a percent on each, just that the effort was put in). Let them trade the papers back so they can see how they did and learn from their errors.
Sometimes an assignment is to see if they can do on their own something you’ve done with them in class; it’s a check on yourself as a teacher as much as on the student. If most of the class couldn’t do the homework, it may be a clue that you need to spend more time on the material. Or that you didn’t explain it well.
For me, if it was a serious assignment, one that required some thought, I always read every one and made a comment on what was good or what needed improvement.
I often used to carry a large quantity of work home, and would be doing schoolwork from after supper until bedtime. Also I had one “free” period during the day that I used for that purpose. Sometimes, just to save myself lugging the weight, I would stay late and do some of that work before going home. I taught English, journalism and history. It was a LOT of material to read.
I had five classes; usually one or two were somewhat advanced, either my journalism or college prep class, the others were “general” students who were probably not intending to go on to college but who needed to be literate anyway. When my 9th grade college prep students were done, they knew the difference between an iamb and a dactyl, a sonnet and a haiku. Most of them didn’t know all of the comma rules, but some did, and they all knew the rules existed.
Teachers who think they are done with work when they leave the building for the day are the ones who give ammunition to the ignorant among the taxpayers who think teachers are overpaid. The real teachers are underpaid, but are working for more than money.
And of course, I left one apostrophe out of my post. You get 10 extra points toward your final grade if you are the first one to find it.
Plus going to my credentialing classes for 4.5 hours two nights a week and writing lessons and grading the things that truly need attention. You may feel the need to not do anything else, but that’s called a “choice”.
I already know how to roam the room and stamp papers based on whether there was something on the paper. You trust kids to grade things with something like accuracy? The period that really needs the oversight by definition doesn’t have many people who will put in the effort at accuracy, understand what the right answer is when it’s not a direct quote of what I said, and not make fun of classmates for bad answers.
Sure.
I bet. It soundsl like you adopted an entire lifestyle, not a job. I have no idea how you made it through without a breakdown.
This is shameful. I don’t know what level you teach at, but at the college level, I am paying money for you to grade my work and get feedback on it and I expect just that. At any level lower, society expects you to do the same.
Well, I don’t know why you’re still going through “credentialing.” I was fully licensed and credentialled before I started teaching. I didn’t have time to go to any classes while teaching; had I needed to, I would have done so during the summer. There are undoubtedly different rules and bureaucracies now than there were in the past. Oh, and I advised the student newspaper, too.
Yes, it was hard work. Of course, it was worth it when the teacher who had my students in the next grade commented on how well prepared they were. I also used to give the kids a chance to grade me at the end of the year – anonymously, if they chose. I usually got pretty good grades from them, and that meant more to me than what the principal said.
I did this to my Physics teacher, but in a semi-relevent way. My paper on Galileo, in addition to the expected data, had (cited) lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the insinuation that besides being a scientist, Galileo also dabbled in candy production, creating the Milky Way bar and being the silent co-founder of M&M/Mars. I did get comments back 
Fortunately I was getting an A anyway and he had a sense of humor.
My English teacher used to read every paper he assigned. Then he arranged a reading or self study day so the he could hand each paper back to the author and spend a couple minutes talking to him or her about it.
I don’t recall the frequency of those papers. Probably not more than 2 a month. Probably less than that.
I still remember many of the lessons I learned reading for, writing, and editing those papers
On the other hand, I had an American history teacher who never assigned a single paper. The final was 25 true false questions. Bubble sheets, of course. I cannot remember much at all from that class.
Found it. Can I trade in those 10 extra points for a back massage?
I gave up on high school when I found myself as a 14 year old routinely correcting teachers - not on smartarse know-it-all 14 year old opinions, but on matters of fact: I had an English teacher who pronounced “hyperbole” hyper-bowl, and didn’t seem to know how to check the pronunciation in the dictionary. I won cash bets off teachers about eytomology: I disagreed with my fifth form teacher on the origins of the word “navvy” - he bet me ten bucks I was wrong, hoping to show me up - he lost, I collected. I dropped out at age 16, as soon as I could, and have never looked back.
For the record, I later picked up a first-class Master’s degree, for which I was awarded a University scholarship - upon learning of this {my father used to teach at a sister-school}, I was invited back to address an assembly at my old school on the value of study and education: I told them what they could do with it, and that anything I had since achieved had nothing to do with them. Screw high school.
9th grade history.
In one essay exam, a student had not the foggiest idea about the issue at hand, so she put in a couple of semi-relevant lines, explained how to make a potato omelette, then a couple of semi-relevant lines.
Got an 8 (of 10), which of course she took as evidence that the teacher hadn’t really read her essay.
Next exam, she knew something, so she wrote about the subject.
Next exam, again no idea, so she explained how to make a roast of salmon and shrimp.
Got a 4 (that’s a fail) and a note saying: “you forgot the salt. The omelette was a lot better”
And no, it wasn’t me.
You don’t hail from a southwestern suburb of Portland, Oregon, do you? 
Yes. If that’s something that you think worth teaching them, it’s quite an important life skill to be able to criticise diplomatically. For real fun, walk around the groups and give feedback to the markers on how well they mark too.
I think a lot of people would say that their job, especially in a service industry, is a lifestyle. If you’re only doing it to keep you off the streets, I’d suggest that you start looking for another career. You’re probably not being too fair on yourself or your tutees if this post is representative of your attitude.
When I was in school, every piece of work I turned in came back with corrections or comments. Clearly, my teachers were reading all the assignments. How else can students learn what they’re doing well and what they need to improve?
For the record, I attended Iowa public schools.
Am I being wooshed?
If you’re assigning homework that you aren’t reading, who exactly is benefiting? That isn’t doing much for the student. In fact, it might be reinforcing very bad information.
And if they know that you don’t read them, I can assure you you’re reinforcing a very very VERY bad attitude.
I agree. These teachers are asking the kids to be creative, yet they can’t even be creative in the assignments they give or time management. Disgusting! They are letting their students down. I for one have not and will not put up with this in the classes I take.
I had a social studies teacher in 8th grade that never read what we wrote. He would routinely assign us homework and grade only the first and last pages. We caught on rather quickly and a classmate once handed in a math paper in the middle of the homework. It was returned with the customary checkmark.
Tests were graded in much the same way, but they were also open book. All of them. He still never read the middle pages.
We had to turn in our notes every chapter. No one took any notes during class time as the lectures really didn’t make much sense. (He once insisted that he could drive from the Massachusetts coast to the UK without taking a boat or any other form of transport.) Many of my chapter notes included illegible scribbles. I still got an A.
It was such a waste of a class. The teacher ended up having a breakdown in class the next year. I think our class may have had something to do with it as we weren’t very nice once we realized what we could get away with, which was just about everything but murder.
In ninth grade, we read Great Expectations, and my English teacher (Mrs. C) assigned about fifteen pages’ worth of chapter-by-chapter questions. Since I am a procrastinator by nature, I didn’t fill in a few spaces each night. Instead, I waited until the due date was extremely nigh, and I realized at about 11 p.m. the night before said due date that I’d never finish the task, as I had barely gotten halfway through. So I skipped to the last couple of pages and scrawled down my replies (pretty much all correct, as I had read the book and participated in class discussions), then turned in the assignment. My gamble paid off, as I received an “A”. Still, I resolved to manage my time a bit better in future, and only had to pull a few all-nighters in college.
My brother had Mrs. B for geography in seventh grade. When the kids pestered her by begging for an open-book exam, she resisted mightily before being worn down by the students’ pleas. However, almost nobody passed, because Mrs. B took all the test material from photo captions, small print on maps, and the like. In other words, information that had not been covered in lectures, and that most of the pupils had no clue how to find.
You’d have never gotten away with that in the aforementioned Mrs. C’s class. Not only did we have to take – and hand in – notes, we got points taken off if we used ditto marks, abbreviations, or other shortcuts. She could have just handed out mimeographed sheets with the material presented exactly as she wished, but no, she figured we’d only learn the grammatical rules if we had to write them down…
My dad taught fifth grade, and also gave music lessons in addition to playing in a band. One way he got papers graded was by handing some to Mom, and even “letting” the kids (once we were old enough) help him out. Since I knew all the state capitals, one of the highlights of the year for me was getting to mark the tests on that subject. There was always a clueless student who’d say “Alabama City” for Alabama, “Kansas City” for Kansas, etc. Well, at least Oklahoma City would save such a scholar from earning a big fat zero!