I know, it sounds like the beginning of a creation myth, which, I guess it is. In the beforetime, a time every teacher who grades essays knows, all was done with the Red Pen (in my case a blue pen). Teachers would circle, underline, squiggle, and otherwise comment on essays in between lines, in margins, and at the bottom of every essay in order to provide feedback.
And it sucked.
No, really. It took so much time to do all of this, and then to have to do it all again on the next one with the exact same comments ate away at my soul a bit. And I noticed by the end of a grading session that the amount of feedback had dropped sharply with my fatigue. Maybe some day I'll chart out the exact relationship, but suffice to say, the longer a grading session goes, the less feedback will be written.
So I tried to streamline. No, not with Alchemist. This is the beforetime. I wasn't willing to give up my analog ways and embrace the digital. So I created stamps. Not the postage kind. I created customized stamps with checkboxes and a legend of marks I would give on papers. I stamped each essay, went through the checklist for the big ticket items, and wrote customized feedback. It helped streamline the system immensely, but the time savings wasn't as much as I'd liked.
But there was a greater problem. Most of what I had was in codes that required a reference sheet, which I provided to students. Unfortunately most of them never bothered to look at the reference sheet to match up the code with its explanation, so I gradually came to the conclusion that this system, however ingenious (mildly, not really that much), didn't fit the bill.
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