Teacher Tip#7: Grade Papers ASAP

Grading is such an ardous task for teachers. It's almost like doing laundry at home: just when you think you washed everything that's dirty in the house, you take off your clothes to take a shower before going to bed and voila! More laundry!

That's grading for teachers. Depending on whether you teach math, English, science, a foreing language, etc., the amount of work you grade will vary. Some teachers only use multiple choice assessments. This really isn't doing your students justice. At one point you need to find out if they really know the material or they are just good at guessing or working backwards from the answers.

Teacher Tip#7: Take control of grading before grading takes control of you!

As soon as you give a quiz or a test, do your best to grade those papers asap. Don't delay. Two main reasons why you should grade them as soon as possible:

1. Students will learn from their mistakes if you give them feedback on an assessment the next time you see them.

2. You're less likely to have a bunch of assignments piled up to grade, only causing you to prolong it even further because again, it'll become a chore that you want to avoid.

I teach high school math and so not only am I interested in whether or not the solution is correct, I also am concerned with the process. Some students could have made a mistake in the process and someone ended up with the correct response (or they could've looked at someone else's paper and there you go, you have a cheater on your hands).

However, I teach five different periods of math and there's an average of 28 students per class. If I give a test that's two pages front and back long, that's going to take me a really long time to grade.

Solution: Don't prolong. I rather stay an hour after school and get some grading done, then take the papers on a ride in my car to my house and back where they'll probably not get graded because once I get home I'm in mommy and wife mode!

If you have multiple classes, start with the largest one. Yes, I know it's probably not what you expected. You probably feel that if you start with the smaller ones you'll get encouraged to continue to that big one. For the most part, that's not true, or at least it hasn't been in my experience.

The times I've left my largest class last to grade, I've stared at those papers and thought, oh brother, that's a huge pile of papers. Whereas if I get the large class overwith right away, even if I do bring the other periods home, I can usually finish one period at a time faster, maybe while watching my favorite show and it's on commercials. So that gives me the energy to keep grading.

So that's some tips to make your grading days a little less stressful. Please feel free to share any other strategies. Happy grading!