Grading

How do you start a blog that is so broad? It should be the easiest one to write, but this whole grading debate and how you approach grading has made me stop and think about how I grade. 

Feedback..... that's the biggest area I see is the most important.  How you give the feedback is definitely the most useful.  I love listening to the high school teachers talk about grading.  It makes me realize maybe I'm not the only one who struggles with what and how you give the feedback.  I would love to sit down and have this debate though with more people at the elementary school.  We definitely have different ways, based on our age level, of how we give the feedback.  Sometimes my feed back is as simple as check the vocab word again and copy it correctly.  Most often my feedback is a reminder to capitalize and punctuate a sentence correctly. 

Grading is probably the hardest part of teaching sometimes.  Its the amount of time we put into it that is the hardest.  I would love to see the statistics on the amount of time teachers spend grading.  What I get the most frustrated with at my level is the lack of time during the day to get some of this done.  We get our half hour blocks of time, but I seem to get into my "groove" and am flying along grading when all of the sudden the students need to be picked up.  So I seem to set them aside and then in a few days I look at the pile and try to figure out how it grew!  By that time then my "mood" has changed when it come to grading.  The first half of the kids papers were graded with one "mood" the other gets another "mood".  That's when we get into the fairness debate. 
Its such a long debate it will be never ending.  I don't know if there is one miracle way of grading.  Will there ever be?  I doubt it.  The best things we all need to look at is our personal goals as a teacher.  Each week they are different.  Since my class has finished most of their cursive letters, I look at that now when it comes to grading some assignments.  Are they forming the letters correctly, that might be how one whole assignment is based.  They think I might be looking for more, but that might be the only thing that day or week.  I really harp on it for a while and then lay off to see if they can carry it through without reminders.  Then the next week might be really watching their reading assignments for complete sentences.  Are they using all the basics they know in their sentence writing?  Capital letters? Punctuation? 

I think we could spend so much time discussing everything we have read about it.  Like I said, I would love to sit down and have this debate with more elementary teachers and find my self bringing these subjects up with them more then I used to.  I love having this class to really talk about pressing issues we are facing.  We all have something to learn.  Even if its to just step back and look at how we are currently doing things in our classroom.  I know through this discussion and class many things have changed how I look at the flow of my room.