Categories
Archives by date
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | |||||
The ‘multiculturalism’/’diversity’ tantrum
At least once a semester, at least one of my colleagues or I hear the following complaint from a student: “I’ve heard enough about diversity and multiculturalism!! Why can’t we just treat each other as human beings?” I’d hazard a guess that anyone who’s taught a social-foundations course in education or other classes where this […]
Decisions, decisions
I’m doing significant course development work in the fall on an entirely distance-learning course, and for this I’ve been offered a rather nice stipend that comes from a federal grant. That’s very nice, but I don’t really want that stipend. (I’m also not sure that I can take it, since I’m teaching an overload course […]
Interesting plagiarism discussion
The Syracuse University grad-student blog, Orange Philosophy, has an interesting discussion of reading student essays and catching plagiarism. I’m not sure I agree with the skeptical approach here—I tend to be a trusting reader unless something jabs me in the stomach, so to speak—but it’s a provocative exercise to read the catching-plagiarism-through-key-disparities approach.
Foolish and sensible consistencies in grading
The practical problem with reading more than 10 or 15 student exams or papers is that one has to balance the need for consistency with the need for sanity. Even with a good bit of experience and a grading scheme (or rubric, or what-have-you—a set of guidelines for grading), there is always the good chance that one’s standards will change from the beginning of a batch to the end. As a colleague tells me, sometimes the paper that you cracked down on for minor factual problems looks a lot better by the bottom of the pile. Conscientious teachers are aware of that and will reread some papers to make sure that the grading standards haven’t changed.
But the deeper grading problem is a simpler physical one: reading student work carefully is exhausting.
Exam grading
And for the next week, almost everything goes overboard while I read student work. Yesterday I had a bunch of meetings, and then the new laptop had some problems (a memory chip needed reseating), but after lunch it’s time to crack down and start reading the undergraduate exams with some discipline (of my mind).