How can a teacher avoid the 'marking' frustration?

Not sure how long you’ve been teaching, but this is pretty much par for the course.

This is my ninth year teaching college courses and for every three-hour class I spend about an hour to two preparing and about the same correcting or critiqueing work. All off the clock.

My friend who teaches English (I teach graphic design) spends about double that amount of time reading papers, correcting, etc.

It’s the nature of the beast.

hmm, I guess you’re right. This is my first year teaching and I am like, “OMG! I have tons of papers to mark!”
I teach English courses at a French school for 7 different grades: grade 3 all the way to 9. Marking will definitely be taking all my time, then.

I have been teaching for six years now and I realized early that in order to stay alive longer, I had to adopt a teaching method that saved me time and energy. Think about if it’s necessary to actually have your students writing long papers and tests too often or are there other ways for you to check what they’ve learned? Work with long-time projects where you put the work focus and responsibility on the students instead of on you, now and then. Teaching doesn’t have to be about you giving lectures all the time, it is also about your students working in order to be educated. Put more responsibility on your students and less on you. After all, we can’t force them to learn, we can only guide them in the right direction – the rest is up to them.

@jazzieppe has listed good ways to reduce that amount, but you’re never going to be completely free. My mother used to be a special education teacher and she only had 8 students but the out-of-school work for her never stopped.

No way around it..but just wait til the summer =)

I don’t know if this is possible, but some of my high school teachers offered a “TA” position for student volunteers. In exchange for helping grade tests and papers, we got extra credit in the class. I did it for French and English.

@MissAnthrope that is one cool thing! I’m not sure the French school will ok it but I’ll ask and check it out! Thanks!

Our high school is considering that as well. Up until now it has been an informal program for seniors who sign up for “office” but negotiate an agreement with a particular teacher to do the work for them. “Office” is a graded course, but as long as you show up and do your job cheerfully and fairly accurately, you always get an A.

I was going to add that my sister, who teaches at a junior college, also always seems to tote work around to grade during holidays and on weekends. It is part of the job of teaching, but can be lessened if you do what @jazzjeppe says, and think about the types of assignments and tests you need the students to do.

I had a teacher that would have us mark other classes papers for her. Everyone got an answer key, and she’d hand out the tests and/or homework and it was up to us to grade them from the answer key. If any of us made a mistake, (in either way) the ponts would be taken off of OUR grade.

That’s interesting! I will definitely suggest this idea of a “TA” or an “office” course to the admin and see how they view it.

I see it as good for the students, too.. it’s a responsibility, plus going over the material so much makes it stick in your head better.

The first couple of years I was working mostly all day Sunday and every evening, when I didn’t fall into be immediately. I taught a behavior classroom. Now, I make sure I do all of my work at work and don’t bring anything home. Sometimes I stay later than I would like; however, it allows me to keep home and work separate.

When I read your question I immediately thought of this one teacher I had.

She would get pissed at the number of papers she had to grade and start marking people down as she got frustrated. But eventually, she kind of quit caring and started marking however. You never knew what she wanted or how you were going to be graded because the deciding factor wasn’t the quality of your work, it was how she felt about grading at the time she got to you in the pile.

Btw, this was grad school and a rather unprofessional teacher all in all.

@avvooooooo feelings may terribly get into the equation but I try my best to filter my emotions out of the process of marking. I’ll keep myself in check from any sort of marking you mentioned. Thanks for bringing up this example! :)

I’ve been a teacher for ten years, and to shorten the hours and hours of grading, I have the students grade each other’s work in class. And like christine215 said, I tell the students that they will lose points off of their assignment if they grade it incorrectly.

I’ll also just give them credit for completion instead of accuracy, and then we’ll go over all the answers together in class. (One of my rules is that students may not turn in late work if we have already gone over the answers as a class.)

@alabdin Cautionary tale! :D