I hate grading. Grading takes so long and marking wrong answers for hours on end after spending so much effort on teaching is an emotional drag. Grading isn’t just obnoxious because it is redundant, length and often mindless. For high school teachers it can often be used as a tool to shame students, to make them feel bad about themselves and that blame is tough to share and unhealthy to deflect to students and their parents.
I was listening to a podcast about how we do not remember our memories correctly. We replace our memories with what we currently believe as often as possible because of how brain storage works. If you currently are aligned heavily with a set of political ideologies, you are likely to shift your memories towards those same ideologies. But I couldn’t help listening to this podcast to think about how grading affects teachers negatively. When teachers grade they see the correct answer 170 times. They even see the wrong answers so frequently that they will often tell the next group in advance of what mistakes they will make. So when a student repeats a mistake it can produce an unhealthy response. We think of students as lazy or that they don’t care. This happens especially when teachers are put under external pressure from administrators, parents and even the students themselves. And as we continue this year after year we eventually reach a point where it is beyond the teacher to remember what it was ever like to learn the material for the first time. We shift our memories to think of our subject matter is being so clear and simple that we disconnect from reality.
About six years ago I was going through my files and I found a set of exams from when I was in college studying chemistry. I looked them over and a multiple-choice question from my advanced thermochemistry class caught my eye. I read a question and saw that I had gotten it wrong. It was about entropy, enthalpy and spontaneity and I got really upset at myself for getting it incorrect. In fact, I remember thinking how furious I would have been had one of my students, even a struggling student, if they had made the same mistake I had made in my third year of college. I had taken high school chemistry, AP chemistry and was over 30 credits of chemistry in to my degree when I made that mistake.
I think that moment has prevented a lot of negativity towards my own students as I now can remember with a little bit of evidence that sometimes students know something but struggle with the mechanics of the question, sometimes new information makes us uncertain and sometimes it just takes time to understand a concept. When students get questions wrong I no longer take it personally. I will never get angry at a student for being wrong or needing more time to understanding something. If a student or parent tries to push an unhealthy pressure on me I feel comfortable deflecting that pressure away and not engaging with them. And I believe I just found the perfect grading system to make this all work.
I have now been using standards based grading assessments for the past three years in my chemistry classes. This has been a minor change as it is really just chopping up the test into sections that focus on 6-10 concepts from a unit (examples are on my chem website). I liked the organization and felt that it improved feedback to students and parents. But in the past two weeks I have started to add one last feature and I think the slight increase in grading is about to be overwhelmed by the reduction in mental health stress in grading. Students will now be able to reassess on standards.
The logistics I am currently planning on using involve having students complete a form for any standard that they wish to reassess that focuses on directing students back to what we learned in class. They can then improve their understanding of the topic and reassess. Reassessments will happen once per week on a rotating after school and lunch schedule that so far has been very reasonable to execute. The following year I will join with the teacher next door to me so that each of us is only responsible for every other week to supervise students reassessing.
Grading still is not fun, but the last two tests that I have graded I have felt so much more at ease with student mistakes. It is no longer an omission that will compound as the year progresses, but instead feedback that the student can rectify and incentive for them to reflect on their understanding as well as what they accomplish during class time. It is no longer an indictment of my teaching but instead feedback to me on what went well and what did not. It is no longer a cycle of two week periods where students rush through material, but instead this allows us to slow down when needed without losing content.
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