Grade Expectations

Warning: This blog entry is essentially just me being neurotic about boring grade-type teacher stuff. Imagine if Woody Allen was a teacher. Read at your own risk. But I guess you've already put up with the bad pun and overused pun in the entry's title, so you're clearly willing to deal with a lot.

There are lots of other things I could probably write about, but this is what it's gonna be: grading. I was not prepared for the emotional roller coaster that grade giving has turned into! I knew that many teachers become invested in their students and worry a lot about their students' success, but I actually experienced a whole mess of emotions while grading my midterms (and now am experiencing the same feelings for the finals). I was not prepared for how intense these emotions could be! I mean, part of this is probably do to the fact that I do most of my grading pretty late at night (because apparently I can only grade when sleep deprived) and so a lack of sleep makes everything a little wackier. However, when I got to the point where I was actually talking out loud to students that weren't there? That's when I knew I should take a break and continue the next day.

But really though! Besides being happy for my students when they did well, or very upset when they didn't (what this sounds like when I'm in talking out loud mode is something like "Good job! Let's all cheer for student X!!!" or alternatively "What the hell were you thinking? REALLY you thought that was the answer? Did you really think that???") other anxieties come into play. For example, I spend a lot of time worrying about what I could have done differently in the class. Maybe so many of them are getting this question wrong because I didn't teach that concept properly! Maybe if I had written the test differently or prepared them better, we wouldn't be having this problem. But at the end of the day, I know that some students will do well, and by necessity many will do poorly. We have to maintain the bell curve, don't we?

Another worry comes in when I think about the fact that I'm not familiar with the grading standards in this country or even at this university. I am, for example, thrown off by the fact that I can only give pluses. So, my only options are A, B+, B, C+, C, D+, D and F. What about A-, that beautiful grade that says "You did a really good job, but you weren't perfect, and I'm a hardass, sorry!" There is none of that here! I gave out many B+'s on the midterms, and I know that some students were very upset by this. One of the deans (one of my bosses) told me that grade inflation at this university is rampant, and that I should consider giving my students very low grades to shock them into studying harder. Don't know if I have that in me, as I feel terrible even when I give out a B, let alone a C+ or a C (but sometimes you just gotta give somebody a terrible grade, I mean, come on). I just gave my freshmen the grades for their finals, and nobody had hysterics, even though I did give some poor grades. Oh well.