I hate grading

Being on a 50/50 load (research and teaching) or as some would refer to it a 50/60/10 load (teaching, research, and service respectively--and yes I'm aware that adds up to more than 100%) would be just fine for me except for one thing: I can't stand grading. I'll do just about anything to avoid it (hanging Christmas lights, reading blogs, even watch a Peanuts holiday special *shudder*).

What's more I don't think I'm alone. I can distinctly recall a class during my graduate years in which the instructor had the rest of the class provide the grades. I wasn't able to attend the grading session but as I understand it, various class members left the room while the rest of the class came up with what grade they should receive. Genius, pure genius I say.

I have a feeling that what we should really do is dispense with grades altogether. What ever happened to criterion referenced evaluation? How about P = I think you should continue on or F = Nope, no thanks, I just finished lunch and I'd like to keep it down.

I think the worst part of this job (listen to me complaining about my dream job) is what I call "grading bleed over." We review grant proposals, we review journal articles, and we review conference presentations. Although I do tend to like the grading scale much better: Accept, Accept w/ revisions, Reject. Who am I to say one paper is an A- and another is a B+? Comments I can handle, feedback I enjoy giving, letter grades? Not so much.

Blogger Bib

For those of you where are into blog research here's a tidy little blog bibliography I came across today on my RSS feed from Oishii!. If you haven't used it, Oishii! harvests the 30+ n bookmarks that fly by the del.icio.us front page. Despite the fact that oishii! suffers from what I would call tyranny of the masses in that it's a best of/most recent link set from the whole show of del.iciou.us users, I still think this is a fabulous way to run across interesting stuff (not to mention engage in grading avoidance behavior--which is one of my favorite pasttimes).

The Mighty Have Fallen (and they can't get up)

Goggle (which at one time was one of the last search engines to not display search results on the basis of receiving compensation) has now fallen (old news, but this is a discussion topic in one of my classes this week). I think Google currently does a good job of shunting the paid links off to the side, but I'm still concerned about the implications of this for educational uses. Kids have a horrible problem with information literacy, and I'm not convinced that it will be immediately obvious to some of them that these are paid. Even if they make the connection they may not see the implications (since their levels of trust for websites on a scale of 1-10 are what I would call "scary high").

One of the biggest offenders in my mind is Yahoo. Yahoo (because it also has a heirarchical search mode) adds searchable content through the use of human editors. As you can imagine, they can't really keep up with the number of web sites being created. Since some people have extra cash, Yahoo will let you pony up 299.00 a year if you want to expedite this process (a 7 day turnaround guaranteed! woo-hoo). The sites that pay the extra "3 Benjamins" are not (as far as I know) flagged in any way as having paid this money.

I think this is bad in the context of education. Espcially when you consider who has extra money laying around (not to mention who doesn't). And let's stop and think about this for a second. You need to pay an annual fee or else your coverage gets dropped? Do they send Nunzio over to make the collection?

Accelerate This

My daughter's 3rd grade class is using a piece of software called Accelerated Reader. As near as I can tell kids read books then come into the classroom and take a short quiz (measuring the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy). It also looks as if they price two things. 1) The software itself, and then 2) the quizzes--which quickly become out of date. My daughter is reading newer books that the school doesn't have the money to purchase quizzes for. My favorite part of this, is that the software has a feature for teacher generated quizzes. I thought great, I'll help our teacher out because I'm sure that teachers (who as one of my colleagues often says, love to share) probably have a website that they post their own quizzes to. Well my first google hit referenced a cease and desist order for a teacher who tried to do just such a thing.

I say let's build our own. We're not talking about rocket science here. The next time I teach a web-database class this will be the final project.