So, I was reading an article on teaching, and it mentioned that one helpful tool for beginning teachers is to keep their thoughts and reflections regarding anything from lesson planning to grading to class lecture and discussions in a journal. The idea immediately appealed to me, and I decided what better way to do this, then to keep a blog. This will mostly just be a personal exercise for me to help me grow as an educator.

Some of my first thoughts are (big surprise) on grading. I've been grading my first batch of essays in my English 101 class and have noticed that I am having difficulty not correcting every single error that I find. It's entirely too time-consuming, and I am leaving little to no work left for my students. However, I find that if I don't make the corrections, I feel almost guilty--like I'm not doing my job letting my students go on thinking that it's okay to use a comma without a coordinating conjunction when combining two complete sentences. I think I'm just going to have to play around with a few different techniques and somehow try to understand that it's just the first paper, and this is a building process. The one idea that I felt would be somewhat helpful, at least for the students, is to build in some time in class when I hand back the essays for them to read them silently and write for a few minutes reflecting on what they felt was successful and what aspects of their papers need a little more attention in the coming assignments. I will try to remember to update after I see how well the exercise goes!

All for now,
DLD