My Assistant Grader
She’s more holistic than me in her approach to assessment.
But she always likes it when students manage to work the words “hermeneutic,” “reflexivity,” and “halibut” into their essays.
She’s more holistic than me in her approach to assessment.
But she always likes it when students manage to work the words “hermeneutic,” “reflexivity,” and “halibut” into their essays.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:31 am
I despise assessment (but will like it much more next semester because I’ve helped to design it) and think it’s totally cool if your students even know any of those words (besides halibut, of course).
I don’t know if that’s Tink or Zeugma (Z?), but she looks so totally peaceful. I can see how cat idolization developed.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:58 am
I have five assistants of that sort, but only three who are willing to let me share the desk with them. They especially like it when I have a fire going in the wood-burning stove.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:31 am
so cute!!!
December 11th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
I wish I looked that inspired and blissful when grading papers.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
Tink’s looking a good bit more blissful than I’ll be looking tomorrow after grading calibration, when 21 of my colleagues and I receive 3384 electronically submitted cadet papers, each needing to be read and graded within about 24 hours.
The eyes, they will bleed.
December 12th, 2006 at 1:52 am
Ugghh. Painful.
December 12th, 2006 at 9:26 am
i second that ugh. But I’d love to hear more about calibration and what you all do–it sounds like norming. How many papers are you each expected to read?
December 12th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
My god, that’s over 150 each (3384/22=153+). That’s insane. I’d sure hate to have mine read near the end. We have about the same number of faculty reading about 600 student portfolios, three essays each, and that’s brutal when stretched over two work days.
On a related note, we’re looking at an ePortfolio system from Chalk and Wire (chalkandwire.com) that would make something like this more manageable, if such can be the case.
December 13th, 2006 at 12:42 am
I love it when cats do that “no paws” pose!
December 13th, 2006 at 9:39 am
[...] But OK: before the boasting, I was talking about final exams. And here’s what I’m thinking, especially given Bradley’s recent comment: if my institution, bound in tradition as it is, won’t let go of the final exam requirement, and if the writer’s retrospective essay might fly as a substitute for what we’ve got in place now, wouldn’t that be a strong argument as well for moving to wholly electronic portfolios, with the final exam writer’s retrospective serving as a sort of rhetorical cover sheet for the portfolio? We’ve got the technology, after all, and the institutional will to use it: I think the only opposition might come from those deeply invested in the write-on-demand philosophy, who might argue such an assignment would be too easy to prepare for ahead of time. But there is a sufficient diversity of things students can say about their own writing, I think, that it would be sufficiently easy to vary the prompt from year to year in ways that might still sufficiently foreground the importance of revision and reflection on one’s own writerly practices. [...]
May 20th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
She’s not assessing any-tink…she’s just enjoying the warmth of the lamplight on her face. Simple Cat Zen.