I turned in my grades for one course and have started marking the exams that my students wrote yesterday. Those will be the final grading of 2006. I wasn't planning on doing any marking last night, but decided I should at least get started. I marked five or six legible exams. There are a few more legible exams to go, then the pile of "My-goodness-did-you-write-this-with-the-pen-in-you-mouth?" exams.
It's best to save those to the end.
10 comments:
i'm afraid mine are usually in the latter category. I feel for my profs. I usually start out fairly legible – feeling like I have everything well under control, and then end in a panicked, manic scrawl. They really should let you word process your exams. Then the profs wouldn’t have to deal with the writing thing and we’d have lovely spell checking!! That’d be the best thing ever.
yay almost done!!!
I feel for you Mike, that's my life everyday, except people's lives/health depend on me being able to read the chicken scratch.
Is it really best to save the illegible ones for last?
Although I see your point...if I see an illegible Rx I usually push it out of the way and hope it will just go away
Well, Roz, the way I figure it, if the illegible exams make me furious to the point that I'm throwing them across the room in disgust (which has happened on occasion), it's not fair to then go and mark legible papers in that mind frame. My rage tends to transfer to the legible papers and I'm at risk of punishing them for another student's crappy handwriting. If I leave the illegible papers until the end I only have them to be frustrated by. While I don't intentionally punish poor penmanship, at least any frustration can only be directed at the offending party.
Give it to me straight doc...
Am I legible or illegible?
Well, first of all, I probably should have clarified the degrees of illegibility. Not all "messy" writing is illegible. Some people, however, seem to think that crossing out huge sections of their essays and trying to squeeze new thoughts into the margins will be easy to read and that the trouble of trying to read such writing is made up by the brilliance of their ideas. They are wrong.
And you are fairly legible.
Disagree, disagree. No. I would save the easiest ones for last, as I was starting to fade. Or anything that started really well. I'd put those away for when I was too sad to go on. This is no different from those who eat their dessert first versus those (like me) who relish the thought of having something good at the end.
Recent research about happiness has shown that although acquiring a lot of money makes people happy, this boost in spirits lasts for only a short while. What lasts is good memories. That's why I am still getting pleasure from a trip to Europe that I took when I was nineteen, and even the trip to New York my mother took me on, when I was eleven. Last year, I took my wife to Spain, on a Mediterranean cruise to Nice, Florence, Rome, and Naples, and then six days in Paris. I'd say I derived more pleasure from that trip this year than from any other single thing. So I am taking her to Scandinavia next year. I am still deriving pleasure from books I read years ago, and the one thing I still retain happily from the three years I spent teaching (over twenty years ago now) is the good memory of reading an exam where a student surprised me with an insight.
Save the best for last, I say, not the worst.
Well, legibility is not necessarily an indication of quality thought. Some of the messy papers contain the best ideas. And some very neat papers were mediocre. My desire to grade the easier-to-read papers has a lot to do with getting some marking out of the way and building up a little momentum. Ideally I would save poor penmanship/brilliant analysis papers for the end because the quality of ideas would make me want to try to read the handwriting.
Ah, I understand your thought process now.
My own handwriting is eminently legible, and my ideas are brilliant and original, so I guess I equate the two.
nothing I like better than some good (over)confidence.
that made me smile :)
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