::A Geek in Korea::

One of the most time consuming things I have to do on the job is grade the majority of my students essay writing once a week. The students are given a paper topic for each week of the month, dependent on their level and ability, and are responsible for one essay topic to be turned in. One beginning level topic might be “Family”, while an advanced topic could be “How can you be a good son or daughter?”

The grading is done by me, by hand, on the days where I come in early or have a break time. I usually grade forty of these in any given week. The revisions required vary from sticking a comma or pronoun in the right place, all the way to completely rewriting the essay after getting a rough Korean-English mess of a response. We slap a grade on it, the secretary records the grade, and we use that as the basis of our “writing” evaluation score at the end of the term. The students then take the corrected essay, then copy it in their notebooks a few times.

There has been a new addendum to this procedure. The scores I give the students now determine if the students have “passed” the essay requirement. Anything about 80% is deemed “passed”, and allows the student to go home at their normal time. Those students that failed will be kept after school in our study room to revise and reedit their essay to get a higher score.

I’m not sure how I like this new power of mine.

No one has told me if this means I’ll be required to remark the same essays repeatedly, but if it does, this idea is a complete and total nonstarter. There is already a backlog of students papers getting graded when some other paperwork requirements pop up, so if I’d have to spend more time doing something like test preparation, this wouldn’t be possible.

Several of my classes submit essays which frequently fail, and some that fail spectacularly. Some of this is because the are new to writing in general, and can’t do it well. Others don’t take the time on their assignments and simply write down something randomly.

Some of my newer students don’t write what I would call essays in a traditional “words in order providing meaning” sense. They are more Rorschach tests using characters in Korean and English. In these “essays”, these languages are applied to a paper that implies a pattern, but in actuality are meaningless blobs of ink or #2 pencil.

I must deal with essays in which introducing grammar, punctuation, or proper spelling disturbs the framework of their writing to a degree that it is actually easier for me to simply rewrite the entire essay from scratch than try to figure out what they are saying. These people are not capable of expressing a coherent thought in English yet, but I am empowered to hold them after school repeatedly until their writing improves.

I’m not sure if they’ll be installing cots, assigning numbers, and then providing meals, because the lower level students will need significant amounts of time to improve. The hardest part of all of this is that my median grade for a coherent, adequate but not outstanding essay is a solid 70% score. In the first class where this metric was used this week, only 30% of the class passed the essay, but several were only slightly under that threshold.

If the students rise to the occasion and spend more time on their essays instead of trying to write them before class starts to avoid this is great. Students try significantly harder on their vocabulary tests because they know failing sucks hours of their free time away being retested on words they don’t know all afternoon. If that’s all this rule does when applied to the essays they write, that will be worth holding some of my lazier students back after class a few times.

At least of the students get better I’ll have an easier time grading their works. I don’t usually ponder the scores I give very much. I like to grade based on the impression I get and on the rubric I’ve developed after MANY hours of checking their papers. Anything to keep me from reading bad essays all day is fine with me.