The bane of any teacher’s life is marking. I get off fairly lightly with mathematics apparently because “it’s either right or wrong”, which is fair to a point, but one has to check the working out, especially if the answer is wrong. How to teachers of essay subjects cope? I’ve no idea.
Marking is, unfortunately, a necessary evil in teaching, but what to the teacher or the student gain out of it in the long run?
The latest fad in teaching is “assessment for learning” where you go through a child’s work with a fine toothcomb and pick out areas of development. APP (Assessing Pupil Progress) some call it, a process where you colour in a chart of what the child has learnt and can therefore “do”. Ofsted like to see that every child’s book has been “marked” regularly, meaning that some staff, and I jest you not, go through ticking every page that has been written on (not actually looking at it) and then write a vague comment at the end, along the lines of:
“You have worked very well Johnny, but make sure that you show some workings out”
“A little less chat will see you achieve your target in this subject Mandy”
“Try to use more commas when writing a long sentence Katie”
“Confidence is the key to your success Billy. Your confidence will grow with the more work that you complete”
Etc.
This process will take a teacher at least an hour for each class of 30 kids, and to what end? The best I can come up with is the following:
The teacher sees whether the child is actually doing some work in class, because kids are very good at pretending to work when in fact they are doing anything but.
The child’s work in class is acknowledged by the teacher and they hopefully have an encouraging comment, with the bonus of something to bear in mind the next time they do some work.
Other than that, what a pointless waste of time. Many students won’t even read the comment anyway, and surely it’s better to say something positive/constructive at a relevant time, rather than writing a comment about it out of context? The trouble is that you have no proof of a verbal comment, and Ofsted or your line manager will want to see proof. So it all boils down to Ofsted once more, the virus that’s infected education and is slowly eating away at its core.
It is line managers that send emails along the lines of:
“Please bring 3 exercise books from each class so that we can compare each other’s marking and maybe learn from it”.
My living nightmare – what could I, a maths teacher, possibly find of use from what an art teacher has to say about a student’s work? But this is all Ofsted again, proving that we are “all singing from the same song sheet”.
All that is rubbish about teaching is linked to Ofsted – a stain on education that just won’t shift, no matter how much stain remover is applied. They have a lot to answer for, and when they do, I’ll go through it with a red pen, correcting their spelling mistakes and suggesting where commas should be inserted.
It probably won’t be polite.
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