The Joys of Grading

With the conclusion of Megan and my first semester of teaching rapidly approaching, we've been spending a lot of time grading the final exams of our students. With over 120 students taking writing and oral exams, this is a fairly time consuming process. I graded roughly 1,100 pages of final exams, though about half of it was just multiple choice and fill in the blank stuff. Nevertheless, this is a fairly tedious task.

Every once in a while, however, a student writes something that makes me crack up (<-- an idiom I taught my students). I thought I'd share some of those times with you.

Grading the first part of the exam while students take the second part.

The first example occurred during the paragraph writing section of the test. The question my students had to answer was, "Who is an example of a hero? What personal qualities make this person a hero?" I was pleased to see that the topic sentence of one of my students paragraphs read:

"Jordan is an example of a hero."

W0w! You know what? I am a hero! I have been underestimating my the influence of my own teaching! I suspected that I had been making an impression, but based solely on the fact that most of the students are older than me I figured that they did not look up to me as a hero. Well, I suppose they do! At this point I was feeling pretty good about myself, but I continued reading. The following sentence:

"Tough and pliable make Jordan a hero."

Okay...I suppose I'm tough and pliable, though those seem like contradicting qualities for a person to have. I marked that one down as an ESL error and continued:

"For instance, on one night, Jordan had loose bowels..."

What?!? I can't recall once discussing the specifics of my bowel movements with my students, though perhaps he's aware of the effects some Chinese food can have on a foreigner. Maybe he's just assuming I've had loose bowels. I'm still holding out hope that my loose bowels are just one of my many heroic qualities. I continued:

"...but he had a very important match on the next day. In order to pursue victory, Jordan didn't give up. He persisted playing the whole game and his team got the victory. As the example shows, Jordan is an example of a hero."

At this point, gravely disappointed, I realized that my student was making the common mistake of referring to someone famous by just their first or last name, in this case Michael Jordan. As an avid sports fan, I even remember the game he's referring to, when Michael Jordan famously had one of his best games while sick with the flu during a game of the 1997 NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz. Oh well, maybe next semester I'll be someone's hero.

The real Jordan with loose bowels.

A few other funny lines from my exams:

• "I am an example of a hero. Honesty, kindness, and stupid make the person a hero." There was no explanation of what he meant by "stupid" being a heroic quality.
• "It is usually more difficult for evil people than kind people to make friends because almost no one prefer evil people." Good to know.
• In a section about customs, I had students finish this sentence, "When you greet an old friend..." My favorite response was "...its acceptable to touch his body."
• In a paragraph about the benefits vs. the costs of the Beijing Olympics, a student wrote "Firstly, history have told us every great event must come from money."

With that the first semester of teaching has come to a conclusion. I have learned a lot and perhaps will post on some specific reflections at some point. Next up: traveling for 4-6 weeks!