I admit, while this term has been wonderful in terms of my face-to-face class time, exploring the possibilities of my newly-developed online course and interacting with students or colleagues at the university, I’m feeling seriously off balance when it comes to my grading.
You could say that I’m in grading jail. It’s a prison of my own devising and it’s not terribly onerous except, of course, for the nagging feeling that I should be grading all the time. (Last night’s hour of watching “Wolf Hall” was strangely mediated through marking source analyses of “Erra and Ishum” and “Nergal and Ereshkigal”.)
I clearly assigned too many things at the end of the term but given that Canadian academic terms are only twelve weeks long, I’m loathe to request a substantial assignment much earlier. The next time I offer the Crime and Punishment course, I’m going to cut my Old Bailey assignments from four to three. All of those were being handed in during the second half of term: quite unbalancing my marking workload. I’ll assign a lit review in the first half of the term in place, getting a course objective addressed earlier in the course where it will be quite useful.
I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with my other unbalanced course. I’m going to have to rethink the assignments and course structure a bit more thoroughly for the online course on the Ancient Near East. I don’t want to ditch the primary source analyses – they’re vital! – but I do need to think about the rhythm of term and what all can be accomplished in twelve weeks. There are six quizzes (one for each unit), two primary source analyses, a project proposal and a short research paper plus the exam. That feels like too much, especially in the last half of term. Some of those need to go and some need to be reorganized. I’m still thinking this one through.
Tomorrow the first group of students in my three courses writes their exam. Wave to the Crime and Punishment class who have been entirely awesome. Seriously: one of the best class groups I’ve taught in over twenty years. The last exams will be written on the twenty-fourth where we’ll see what the students in our fun team-taught course on Early Modern War can do. Three classes, three sets of exam papers: there’s about a hundred exams I’ll be expecting to see in those courses. Well, maybe eighty-five or eighty-eight, as my co-instructor in the war courses will take half of the pile.
I also have a whackload of graduate and senior project reviewing to do. How many fifty page papers can you respond to in an already busy week? Again, it’s part of my workload but not entirely predictable (most of it comes much later than I would like or theoretically expect as I plan my term). The only predictability is that these project papers will always come later than we want and just when marking’s heaviest.
For now, I’m dropping some revision notes into my virtual class folders to remind me how I want to rebalance the assignment plans for the next time I offer the course (likely one to two years away). I should also put a note in my calendar for next fall when we’re likely to be discussing graduate supervisions reminding me to expect some crazy times in March and April when all of those papers land in my inbox. Maybe next year I’ll feel well-balanced when it comes to marking. That’s the hope!
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