I’ve been shut in all day trying to grade papers and do some evaluations. I’ve graded so many "I like the World Cup" and "My favorite pet" journals that my mind can no longer focus on the corrections I need to make. All the missing prepositions, scrambled words and bad spelling takes a toll.
Since I been grading papers like these for so long, I’m pretty sure I can crack the Enigma code of the children’s grammar most of the time. Since word order and sentence structure is so different, I know some of the people I’ve worked with don’t have an easy time with journals. The phonetic spelling, or occasional Korean word or phrase doesn’t help either. While it might only be a few sentences of text, each can take several minutes to correct.
The evaluations are from classes I taught over a month ago. I have no test results, no homework, no faces to go along with the names anymore. Some of the students were only in my class for a week or two, and I didn’t even learn their name. I have absolutely no idea why it’s taken a month to get these evaluations onto my desk. Now here I am trying to think up specific comments for students I no longer teach, and who might have already quit the school. When the other teacher complained about how he didn’t know the students well enough to comment, they told him to, "Be vaguely supportive and pretend."
Nice.
