Getting Burned Out Grading Papers and Making Tests

Teachers are you getting burned out with constantly grading homework and creating new tests, as well as the long hours of lesson planning? THen it is time to prioritize your tasks and focus yourself. Teachers can easily fall into the trap of trying to do everything all at once and perfectly and it can quickly lead to burnout. So how do you get around grading every single paper and making every single test yourself? Here are some ideas to help save you time and unstress yourself.

Establish Work Hours:

Establish for yourself some work hours and set some time aside each week to do the common classroom and teacher tasks. If you have some time planned ahead to do the work then you can do it in an udistracted environment. If you are focused, not talking to collegues and not watching television at the same time as grading it will go much faster. To often teachers stay late to grade papers and then end up getting interrupted by other teachers and peers at the school. Talking to the custodian or office manager for half an hour is not goingt o get the grading done. So set aside time each day and really focus yourself. Find somewhere quie where you will not get interrupted.

Be realistic about the amount of time you are putting and set that time aside. Then once the time is done go home. If you have to bring some work home then do so but set some firm goals of what needs to get done. Then once you have done these things do something else. Go home and enjoy the rest of your life. One routine I used for years when I started teaching was to work until 4:30 every day. This gave me an extra two hours every day to get done with my job and then I did not take anything home.

Dont Grade Everything

Many teachers get caught grading every single paper. This can be very time consuming and leave you feeling like you can never get ahead. There is no reason for this. One of the major functions of grading is to check if your students are getting the concept you are trying to teach or not. If they are not then you need to reteach and do more practice. If they get the concept and they are showing that they understand by getting correct answers in their independent work then you can move on. In order to get this undersanding you just need a dipstick approach. Don't grade everything and every problem but instead focus on the major assignments and grade those. You can also randomly pick five problems off a page to correct instead of all 30 problems.

Use Peer Checking

Another way to spot check is to do it together as a class. Have students trade papers with their peers spot check ten of the problems and then have them turn it the "graded" paper. Don't use this to go into your gradebook as it might not be 100% valid since students can make mistakes when correcting. Instead use it to gage your next lesson.

Grading Homework

Again ou dont have to gade every piece or homework for correctness of each problem. Instead you can either spot check like spoken about above, or you can use a simple check for completeness or not. WIth this system you are simply looking to see if the problems on the page are all complete. You can use a 2 point system. Complte papers get 2 points or a check plus. Incomplete papers get a check and papers not attempted or done at all get a check minus. This speeds up grade homework. Now if you are worried about report cards and grading for report cards agains pot check pick every fiffth assignment to grade for your homework.

It can easily take hours upon hours of lesson planning and test creation time unless you work carefully. Many beginning and even experienced teachers can quickly fall into the trap of spenind enourmus amounts of time planning. Here are some ways to combat that.

Use The Publishers Materials

Often as teachers we fall into the trap of feeling like we have to create everything and it all needs to be super creative and exciting. Well, part of teaching and learning is just basic routine stuff and it can't all be excting 100% of the time. So don't try to reinvent the wheel everytime you do your lesson planning. Instead draw from th resources you already have. For example most textbook publishers offer a wide vareity of tests and lesson plans that come witht he adoption. For example California just adopted a new science program this year. With it came a whole mass of CD media, lesson plan books and everything you can every need for lesson planning. So instead of trying to create a test for the end of the unit chapter test use what the publisher provides.

Keep in mind you can always modify the publishers tests if you have to but try to use what is already done for you.

Use The Internet

Antoher great place to find a ton of premade materials and save youself a great deal of time is the internet. Teachers are always willing to share what they do and many very enterprising teachers post their stuff online. If you can get hooed up with some teacher forums you can often ask other teachers if they have anything on a certain unit or topic of study. There are hundreds of teacher forums and message boards and I find teachers are always willing to help out another teacher. So just do some internet resaerch and bookmark some good sites and then don't be afraid to ask.

Work WIth Other Teachers

If you can find someone that you get along with well then it can always help to partner and join forces with another teacher. That way you can divide and conquer. You create the chapter tests for half the units and then have your partner do the other half. Or you can even break down by subject and you do two subjects and your partner teacher can prep the other two.