4 Comments
Jul 30Liked by Robert Talbert

I like this method, hopefully I can adapt something similar when the semester starts back up in a few weeks!

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I just want to push back on your assertion in the first sentence, gently and with support: I've always enjoyed 'grading' (even now that I eschew assigning grades). Reviewing/giving feedback on students' work is one of my favorite things about the job, as I get the opportunity to peer inside their brains and see what's happening. That may be even more true in recent years, when I moved most of my assignments (what students are submitting for my review) to reflective writing, which is much easier when you're teaching in my discipline (political science) than, say, in math. However, this fall I'm teaching a math/statistics course, and I'm sad that the coordinated course is comprised almost exclusively of auto-graded homework assignments and quizzes/tests nestled inside of proprietary courseware, because I won't have access to that kind of insight... so I'm strategizing how to layer on opportunities to make students' thinking more visible without burdening them with even more work in a heavy-workload course. My point, though, is that I've never seen "grading" (or now, reading/giving feedback on student work) as unpleasant, even though there have been many times where I was overwhelmed by how much of it I had stacked up. But that's largely because of the labor foisted upon instructors and not because of the task itself.

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author

No worries, but you might be the first counterexample I've met! And I'm sure you're aware that the word "nobody" is a rhetorical device, not an actual quantification.

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Yes--of course. Rhetorical-device away! I have found very few others who will express a fondness for 'grading' (or whatever they're doing), but they DO exist! It's not just me!

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