I tried to stay up late to grade those compositions last night, but I was falling asleep in front of the computer! :-(
The good thing is that the first two I read were amazingly excellent in terms of structure, development, organization and ideas, so I only had to correct language issues* YAY! No need to criticize much, just to write "excellent!" "perfect!"
*concordance, word choice, gender, etc. and in spite of their essays' great qualities, there were plenty of small problems for these two amazing students.
That's why I got stuck in the 3rd paper -- the 3 aspects analyzed in this descriptive/comparative composition (comparing 2 films) were not listed in the introduction, parts of the intro were choppy and didn't covey much (were vague), etc.. And I know that this student is really stressed out about her work and will be asking for justification for each mistake. So... it'll be EXHAUSTING to finish grading it. Sigh...
This "judgy" side of the job is tough (and also being judged when submitting articles for publication, [Dr. Crazy's post about peer review explains the process well]). As Jo(e) well put it in her comment to my previous post, it's hard to conciliate being supportive of students with being "tough" with them while evaluating their writing so they can get better at it. (sigh...)
It's really weird how my own issues (of having a really hard, horrible time being evaluated & getting feedback -- I cannot stomach reading student evals, for example) end up making grading essays and commenting on them so hard for me. Sigh...
But I have to go and do it, I only have about 2 hours to finish before I have to drive to U#2...
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