Image CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 Steve Rotman on Flickr.com
I’m joining Trina Haase at Trinarrative for a daily haiku challenge this month.
Semester grades are due tomorrow, and I have spent the day sorting papers, opening files, checking off boxes, charting numbers. It feels more like bookkeeping than grading. I suppose I could take more time and try to give meaningful feedback, but I suppose I feel like students have learned what they’re going to learn from the class they’ve completed. I’m not sure that they would even locate an additional few comments posted to a course website. Still, I feel like the rich thinking in their final reflective papers is a missed opportunity for feedback and connection. My conflicted feelings did inspire today’s haiku:
end of semester
piles of papers, files on files,
too late for feedback?
the dirigible plum 
2 responses to “Grading Haiku: Haiku-A-Day Challenge #16”
[…] A haiku about the least haiku-y thing I do: grading […]
Oh, I don’t give feedback on final papers. I know then they’re just looking for the grade. I did comment on a few students’ final reflections but only because I felt it important to respond to something they said about themselves. For instance, I had a student getting down on herself for her poor performance at the end of the semester, so I left her a comment asking her to consider reframing it as a learning experience and to remind her that the first semester of college can be hard adjustment.
But for their research papers? Nah.