Grading Papers

Grading papers is not something that I am very accustomed to doing. I have never been a teacher in any formal sense, so when I sat down yesterday to grade some papers, I didn't really know how I was supposed to start! I know that sounds silly, but I didn't know if I should sit down and plan enough time to do them all in one sitting...so I decided to just dive in. Layna McCorkle, my mother in law gave me the idea to give a test in this fashion: Give the students X amount of words and tell them to write a story using those words. Well I thought this was a great idea, especially since they have a difficult time resisting the temptation to cheat off of one another. Let me explain that. In China, it is ok, no, more than ok to cheat. It is seen as good because if you cheated to get the answers to a test, you did what it took to get an A. So, I had to fight against this and I thought, "What better way to fight the plagiarism than to give them a group test and have them collectively write out a story using X amount of words!" Yes! So I did just that. I gave the students a list of 60 words they should know and had them choose 30 of them to write their story. After the test I realized I didn't want to sit there and search for the words they chose. So that was disappointing. I had to give the tests back the next week and ask the kids to circle the words they chose from the list. haha, I felt silly. Anyway, I decided what it took to grade papers was some creativity ;)...really I just got ADD and decided to take some pictures of things on my desk. Ha! It was fun! And it helped me get through grading the papers! I was drinking hot chocolate (as I do much of these days) so I took some pictures of my pretty new mug I got and my papers to grade. I will show them to you! Isn't this mug the cutest thing you've ever seen? I love it. It's like Christmas, early!


These are the things you need in order to complete a day of grading papers! :) Thanks for reading! I love you all and don't forget to think about me in China!