The dirty secret of teaching

I shyly admitted to a friend the other day that I was having to re-score old student papers in order to use the data in action research.  When I scored the papers the first time I did a dirty job of it - now I am re-doing the scoring the way I wish I had.

"Oh, don't feel bad about that," she said kindly. "I have a teacher in the family; I've heard this before. You all have a secret pile a papers you never corrected, right? You stress about this: Should you hand them back to students after all this time? Or just throw them out?"

Ahh, the dirty secret of teaching.

In teacher school you think of course you will always correct assessments immediately, handing them back while the work is fresh in students' minds. But then there you are, carrying a battered folder of overdue uncorrected papers from school to home and back again. (If I told you how many times, I'd have to...)

Of course, and always, there is never enough time. Something must be left undone. Why, is correcting papers the thing left undone? Why do I avoid this task, above all others? As Alfonso Procaccini (my favorite college professor) taught me, there is a method to madness. I can look backwards at what I actually do to figure out what I am thinking and why.

When I am correcting students' papers, I could focus on what the student has learned. I could be thinking, "Look at what this student has learned! Where is this student on the continuum of learning this skill, or gaining this knowledge?"

Is there a teacher out there that thinks like that? Not me. I think "Why is this student not getting this?" which leads me right to "What have I done wrong? How am I failing this student?"

By leaving the papers in the folder instead of reading them I avoid feeling...shame.