Sep 13, 2025

Exactly the same

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Pumpkins & asters

This weekend I’m slowly making my way through a fat stack of literacy narrative rough drafts. Draft-reading is the part of teaching I enjoy the least, which is a polite way of saying I spend a lot of time procrastinating and complaining about it.

Viburnum berries

Draft-reading is like any other daunting task: it seems impossible when you look at the looming pile, but do-able when you divide the work into small chunks and focus on the paper right in front of you. The hardest part, in other words, is motivating yourself to get started, which makes draft-reading exactly the same as draft-writing.

 

May 14, 2025

Slow and steady

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Stone turtle

At the start of every semester, I tell myself the way to keep up with grading is to steadily chip away at my paper piles: slow and steady wins the race. And most semesters, I quickly fall into procrastination, waiting until I have a big chunk of time to grade an entire batch of papers. Why start a task if you don’t have time to finish it?

More recently, though, I’ve changed my approach. On each day’s to-do list, I now have an item named “Paper pile.” And on a separate list that isn’t linked to any given day, I have an item for each outstanding assignment.

Every day, if I spend any amount of time grading, I can cross “Paper pile” off that day’s list, even if I don’t finish a complete batch of assignments. I get credit, in other words, for starting to grade a batch of papers, not just for finishing.

It turns out the tortoise in the old fable is right: slow and steady really does win the race. The way to reach the bottom of any paper-pile is to start, even if you don’t think you have time to finish.

 

May 13, 2025

The final countdown

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Grading progress

There comes a time every semester when I’m not yet done with grading, but I can start to see the bottom of my paper pile.

Yesterday I submitted Babson grades, so today I started grading the Framingham State projects that were due on Sunday, with another set of essays coming in tonight, and a final set of semester reflections arriving by Thursday night. My path to the end of the semester is staggered, the better to keep me from staggering.

Because I am easily distracted and in constant need of positive reinforcement, I write down the number of papers I have left in sets of five: four fives for a class of twenty, and six fives for a class of thirty. For every five papers I grade, I can cross one of the fives off my list.

By my current calculation, I have seventy papers between me and “done”: fourteen sets of five. Organized incrementally, even the highest paper pile is surmountable.

 

Dec 17, 2024

When you have time to do it

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Porch penguin

It’s been a week since I taught my last Fall semester class at Framingham State, and tonight is the final deadline for students’ final projects. Given how frantic a typical semester is, with juggling upon juggling, the end of the semester unspools more gradually, with each due-date coming due in turn.

I submitted my Babson grades over the weekend, so I’ve had a brief lull between those grades and these. During this brief break, I made next year’s photo calendar, I started wrapping Christmas gifts, and I completed this year’s round of cybersecurity training: the kind of tasks I save for the almost-end of the term.

Some of my students have already submitted the project that is due tonight, so I’ve started grading those early submissions, with the final push starting tomorrow. When I was an undergraduate, I perversely enjoyed finals week because without the need to attend class, I could focus full-heartedly on term papers and final exams. Decades later as a college instructor, I feel similarly. Grading isn’t too bad when you have time to do it.

 

Mar 23, 2024

An introvert’s dream

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Roxy under blanket...

Today is rainy and raw. Roxy hates to go out in the rain, but I force her to walk anyway, and she repays me by smelling of wet dog all day.

Part of me prefers rainy days to the harsh brilliance of the March sun, when there is no greenery to temper the unremitting glare. A mix of sun and rain is best, of course–moderation is best in all things–but when a rainy day comes on the heels of several sunny days, the change comes almost as a relief.

Sunny days are extroverted and energetic: days to be busy and get things done. Rainy days are perfect for hunkering down at home and turning inward: an introvert’s dream. Sunny days are for socializing, rainy days are for solitude, and I know which I prefer.

I’m often more productive on rainy days, given the lack of social distractions. Reading a book on a sunny patio is one of my summer pleasures, but during winter-into-spring, I need to be inside at my desk, grading papers on my laptop.

Grading papers on a laptop feels downright cozy on rainy days: brew some tea, toss a blanket over the (wet) dog, and tackle the paper-piles you’ve been procrastinating.

 

Feb 19, 2024

Grading day

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Hillary in the doorway

Today is Presidents’ Day, so instead of spending the day on campus teaching, I’ve spent the day at home quietly grading papers.

There are Hollywood movies that glamorize the job of teaching–think Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, which I saw when I was an undergraduate English major with dreams of becoming an Inspiring College Professor–but there is absolutely no way to make paper-grading look exciting. According to the movies, teachers inspire their students by posing thought-provoking questions that encourage students to express themselves…but movies don’t show the long hours teachers spend grading the papers that are the product of that self-expression.

Paper-grading is boring, but it isn’t a terrible way to spend the day if you have enough time to do it in a leisurely, gentle way. Whenever I fall behind with grading, I tell my students that I get crabby (and my grading gets harsher) when I try to hurry through too much of it. Grading works best for instructors and students alike when you do it in small batches, with breaks for hot beverages and other consoling delights.

 

Nov 23, 2021

People Before Papers

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Crocker Hall

Every semester, I have a method for triaging teaching tasks. My basic rule is People Before Papers. This means paying attention to the student in front of me is more important than grading papers. What this means in practice, unfortunately, is that paper-grading inevitably gets bumped to the bottom of my to-do list.

Prepping classes takes priority over grading papers, for example, because class time is People Time: that is, time spent face-to-face with my students. I can catch up with paper-grading later, but I can’t make-up precious class sessions after they have passed.

If I’m in my office grading papers and a student walks in with a question or problem, the rule of People Before Papers applies. My paper pile is set aside so I can tend to the student in front of me.

If no student shows up for my office hours, the People Before Papers dictum applies to email, too. The paper-pile can always wait–it certainly isn’t going anywhere–while I answer an emailed question. As slow as I am at grading, students sometimes mention how much quicker I am responding to email than their other professors are.

When it comes to days off and weekends, People Before Papers applies to folks who aren’t my students. Lunches or weekend outings with J take precedence over my paper-piles, as do get-togethers with friends or the care and feeding of the pets. (Pets, after all, are people, too.)

What this all means, of course, is that paper-grading invariably gets pushed to the bottom of my priority pile. It’s not entirely a case of procrastination, although there is, of course, an element of that, too. Instead, it’s a matter of having too many obligations and not enough hours, with paper-grading always deferring to other priorities.

Every Fall semester, I look forward to Thanksgiving as a chance to catch up in large part because my other obligations lessen then. Every moment I’m not prepping or teaching classes can be spent grading papers. And as soon as students head home or elsewhere for the long Thanksgiving weekend, I have fewer questions to answer in-person or via email.

So while my students look forward to traveling, spending time with friends and family, and enjoying other holiday pastimes, I look forward to a long weekend of monotasking, everyone else’s holiday giving me a chance to catch up with work.


 

Nov 3, 2020

Abuzz

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Yesterday's news

I’ve been tethered to my laptop for most of the day, commenting on a fat pile of student essay drafts in advance of tomorrow’s in-person classes. Reading student papers is an excellent way to ignore the news: paper-grading requires concentration, and concentration is the antithesis of the obsessive checking of the news and social media I did four years ago on Election Day.

Earlier when I stepped away from my paper piles to pick up our usual Tuesday night Thai takeout, my smartwatch began vibrating at urgent intervals, each buzz an admonition to Check My Phone for the latest predictions, punditry, and speculations. J and I will watch the news later tonight, but for now, I swipe away each urgent buzz and turn back toward that fat paper pile.

 

Nov 19, 2019

Expectation vs reality

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One woman's trash is another woman's fashion

It’s a gray and rainy day–a damp, drizzly November in my soul–and I spent most of my office hours grading papers. We’re at the point of the semester when I could grade 24/7, and the bottom of my paper-pile would still be far, far away.

Sadly, I have things to do besides grade, so I chip away at my paper-piles during the smidgens of time between classes, meetings with students, and the perpetual need to prep class after class. (The biggest challenge in teaching six classes isn’t that you have six classes’ worth of papers to grade; it’s that every moment you spend in class teaching is a moment you aren’t reading papers.)

I’m writing these words in a notebook while my first-year writing students are crafting opening anecdotes for the essay draft that’s due next week: another batch of papers for my pile. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Toledo, I sometimes would go to University Hall late at night with nothing but a notebook, and I’d sit at the front of an empty classroom writing, imagining the day when I’d be a college professor sitting at my desk writing while my students sat quietly working at theirs.

This was the late 1980s, so I had no idea my eventual students would compose on laptops, tablets, and phones more often than with pen and paper. And I had no idea then how many papers I’d be reading now. How could I have known? Grading papers is invisible work: I never actually saw my professors doing it. Instead, I saw them lecturing in class or looking profound during office hours, when they were invariably poring over a book, never student papers or that more recent bane of modern academic life: email.

When I was an undergraduate, I never took freshman composition, the class I now primarily teach: the adjunct’s bread and butter. I never wrote drafts that were commented on then returned to revise. Instead, I took Honors Readings Conference my freshman year, and I met with my instructor face-to-face to talk about every paper I wrote. There might have been comments on those essays: honestly, I can’t recall. What I remember were the conversations I had with my professors and the awe-inspiring realization that they took my ideas seriously enough to encourage me to think about them even more deeply.

I’m not sure I’ve ever accomplished that in any of my written comments on student drafts: I’m not sure (ultimately) that these comments are even the point. What I had no way of knowing when I sat writing at the front of those empty late-night classrooms when I was an undergraduate in Ohio was how much of my life would be frittered away grading papers and how little of it would be spent face-to-face with my students, having the kind of deep conversations I so enjoyed. My expectations then seem as removed from my current reality as the height of today’s paper-pile.

 

May 14, 2019

Another step closer

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Beginning and end

The past month or so has been crazy. Days after we put Bobbi to sleep, J left for a two-week business trip, leaving me to tend the house and pets during the busiest time of the semester…and while J was gone, Toivo spent an unplanned week at the Angell Animal Medical Center being treated for a massive abscess in one of her hind legs. Toivo’s been home for a week, J’s been home a little more than that, and today I submitted the first of two batches of final grades: not yet the end of my semester, but another step closer.

Hairpin turns

This past month or so has felt like a marathon with an ever-shifting finish line. Weeks ago while J was out of town, one of our neighbors invited me to an Easter gathering at her house, and I begged out, choosing to focus on my chores and paper piles instead. I finished those chores and those papers, but others appeared in their place: this is, after all, the nature of both housework and paper-grading. Every time I see our neighbor, she asks whether I’m done grading, and every time, I say the same thing: not yet, not yet. It’s not that I’m not making progress; it’s that there always is more.

For good or ill, this is what it’s like to teach college composition at multiple institutions: as soon as you finish reading one batch of papers, there’s another coming in. I’ve come to see my workload as being like the tide: first one wave, then the next, then the next.

Turns

Today when I submitted final grades for my classes at Babson College, I took a minute to breathe a sigh of relief…and then I wrote an updated to-do list with the final papers and projects my Framingham State students are submitting today and Thursday. My final Framingham State grades are due next Monday, and that is when I can gratefully collapse into an exhausted heap of relief. Until then, I keep my head down and count every item crossed off my list as another step closer to done.

I took these photos of the memorial labyrinth at Boston College weeks ago, after J had left for his business trip and before Toivo’s unplanned stint at Angell. It was a pretty day when I felt like I had my life and to-do list under control, and then things took a proverbial turn.

 

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