Grading: Projects

First, let me apologize for yesterday's post. Looking back, I was pretty upset and used really poor grammar. Sorry about the misspellings too. Now onto today's post.

I remember getting projects and thinking 'this is way too much work for one stupid grade' or 'she (my teacher) just wants to give us busy work and grade something that takes no thinking.' Basically I was a high school student. Now, I still think this is too much work but for a different reason... GRADING. I spent 30 minutes grading one student's brochure on being forensic chemist as a career. I graded it 5 different times before I finally settled on an 80 something. I'm just a poor grader when it comes to projects. I don't want to give a bad grade because honestly it is a lot of work but half of them seem to put no work into it. It goes against my nature to look at something creative and say it's not good enough. Yes there were a few brochures that I had no problem grading as a 45 but mostly I just tortured myself. Ugh! I remember why I chose this career, helping someone move forward and maybe even alter their life, yet each day I question myself. Maybe it's a good thing... or maybe I should re-think grad school.

Grading Tests = A Whole Roll of Tums

So what's more disappointing then taking a test and failing? Having your students take a test and fail. In high school I was the girl that only made A's. I cried the first time I saw a B on one of my daily grades but I never received below 91 on my report card. I couldn't believe it the first time I made a C on my Pre-AP Calculus test. I went home and absorbed all I could. I even called the teacher. I felt terrible! Now I'm preparing to work at the retail store and all I can think about is that class with an avg of about 50-60 on their first test. Did I not tell them something correctly? What was I thinking going through everything so quickly. Maybe I should have been louder or asked more questions or wrote more down or made them write more down or given more homework or quizzed more or not done that lab or... Yea I'm definitely not happy right now. I let them take a 10 question retest but they missed from 2-5 problems and I even stood in front of them before handing out the test and gave them the exact information they needed. Maybe I should work on getting my Masters and let someone else handle the upset stomach and migraine filled grading.