Professor Sharon

Grading.  Need I say more?  To some, yes.  So I guess I will.

If we had authentic situations in place to allow students to demonstrate their knowledge in other ways than on a piece of paper, grading would be a whole different game.  And, that is what it is.  A game.  At worst.  At best, it is a way to demonstrate your connections of thinking and knowing and being about a subject matter.

Well, I suppose I could keep on philosophizing, but I won’t.  I’ve always said that if I could only be a worse professor, I wouldn’t have huge, and I mean HUGE, piles of grading at the end of a semester.  I would only have bubble sheets and an Excel spreadsheet to do the math.  But, I’m not that kind of professor.  I want real world application of the content – albeit on paper as I have no real world to apply it to real centers with real children, but a well thought out application on paper will achieve a good result.

And, what does all that mean?  Four or five days of several hours a day grading huge projects: and, I don’t just put a check mark.  I write feedback on almost everything.  Crazy – yup, it is.  Authentic – as close as I can get it.  And, I’m proud of it.

But, am I ready not to do this anymore?  Oh, my – that is such a HUGE YES!!