Grading Blues

Honestly, I'm glad I didn't bust my ass Friday to get these drafts done. Out of 21 papers, I had 9 Fs (that's including the one student who's never shown up but is still enrolled for whatever reason). The Bs outnumbered the Cs for the remaining half of students and there was one A and one D. Many of the students with Bs improved their grades from essay 1.

Part of me feels like if half the class has failed, then it's my fault. That there was something wrong with the assignment or the way I taught this. But in the interest of trying make myself not feel like a loser bad summer teacher, here's what I noticed about these Fs:

All but 2 of the students who earned Fs do not participate in class. A couple are usually on their phones texting the entire class period, and I don't usually see their books. Nor have they indicated that they are even keeping up with the reading. And the videos we watched for their essays--well, they were not the students taking notes (which is clear by the fact that these students got a lot of information wrong. I guess if you're sleeping, it's hard to get the correct information). Another thing that I noticed, too, was that for the most part, their final drafts were almost exactly the same as their rough drafts, only they just added a page. So despite my providing very specific comments on the draft, the students who earned Fs did nothing to the first halves of their essays and just added more plot summary, more speculation about what might happen if things were different than what we talked about. A couple had no conclusion. One had an introductory paragraph that was one sentence. Not a single one of these students came to see me either about the comments or their drafts. Also, we had a thesis workshop day. We spent the entire day on thesis statements. We worked in groups with their actual thesis statements, and we workshopped as an entire class. We went over different strategies for writing a thesis statement, and I sent them home with a handout that they had to do to get them to keep working on the thesis statement and basically have them outline what examples they were going to use to support said thesis statement. Not a single one of these F papers changed their thesis statements from the rough draft. And not a single one of them has gone to the writing center either for help.

Lots are still struggling with the concept of the thesis statement still, and they have a chance to revise before the end of the quarter next week. We'll see what happens. But of the remainder, I can at least see the change in drafts to get to more of an argument. And we'll work on thesis statements again tomorrow and prewriting strategies some more so they can formulate an argument for essay 3.

So am I supposed to feel bad about those students who are clearly not putting in the effort? Yes, I know there are all kinds of reasons why students don't do the work and freak out about writing (I'm freaking out about my own writing right now), but if the students are ignoring the comments, not taking advantage of my office hours, not participating, and not even changing the rough draft for the final draft, what in the world else can I do besides write the paper for them (which I feel I practically do when I say things in class like "For your paper, you need to do x, y, and z. And here's exactly how you do it."). Nothing causes me more pain in my teaching than comp. Or is all of this just my lame ass attempt in trying to make myself not feel like a total failure of a professor when I actually am. I will admit, I do wish that I had more energy to give to them, and I do feel like exhaustion has affected my teaching in the classroom somewhat, but it hasn't affected my feedback or my availability. But again, is that just my lame ass attempt to hide the fact that I might suck these last two comp quarters?