never again

I'm an exacting grader when it comes to writing. The problem with being so picky, though, is that it takes a million years to wade through sixty or eighty student essays. Over the past few days, I spent about eight hours—almost two hours per class—grading student writing. Tonight was the final paroxysm: it took me four hours to get two batches of papers done. I worked until midnight and was cross-eyed by the end. On each student's paper, I circled, underlined, scratched out, annotated, and listed. I complained about formatting ("Please double-space from now on!"); I zinged students for poor capitalization, punctuation, verb-tense control, singular/plural errors, subject/verb-agreement errors, diction errors, incorrect use of italics, incorrect use of relative pronouns, dropped articles, faulty parallelism, and all the other sins for which Korean students are infamous.

That was a fuck of a lot of work. So: never again! If someone were conducting a time-and-motion study, that person would conclude that I was being woefully inefficient. To which I'd reply: inefficient, maybe, but definitely thorough, unlike those chumps who breeze obliviously through writing assignments while not really paying attention to the nitty-gritty details.

My alternative strategy? Now that the students have some idea of what sorts of errors I'll catch, I will instead merely circle or otherwise highlight errors as I find them, leaving it up to the students to figure out where they went wrong. If I can get my productivity to the point where I'm grading an essay every two minutes, that's about 36 minutes per class and less than 160 minutes of grading in total. That would put me at under three hours for four batches of papers, and I could use the extra twenty or so minutes to write up and upload an omnibus "error sheet" for all the classes to peruse (as I did with this most recent batch of student papers). Much faster that way.

What pisses me off most is that all this grading kept me from walking Namsan tonight. I stayed at the office long enough to encounter the nighttime security guard, who asked me to lock up when I left. I told him about my ID card's problem: I can use the card to get into our faculty office when it's locked, but I can't lock up when I leave. He sighed and told me to turn the lights and A/C off when I left. I imagine that he's the guy who's been closing up after I leave at night. I really need for my card to be fixed: this is posing a security hazard. I'm beginning to think the card is defective and needs to be exchanged for a new one. The office has tried three times now to fix the damn thing, to no avail. This is getting stupid.


_