oh, how I hate grading.

I'm a college prof.

I teach at a small campus - really no grad students (we don't have a doctoral program; what few ta's we have are on loan from the larger psychology program). So I do all my own grading.

I loathe it. And yet - I keep assigning homework and giving tests. (The tests I have no choice in. The homework I could dump but my informal, non-statistically-analyzed study convinces me that students get higher grades if they have homework to do over class topics).

The worst part is interpreting what the students write. Some will write in teeny-tiny-eye-strain-o-vision so, I suppose, they figure that if the prof can't read it, they won't bother to check it. (I usually just mark it wrong, if I can't read it. Sometimes the students complain and I make them tell me what their answer was.)

Others - they just put these cryptic scribbles and expect I can interpret it.

I gave a genetic analysis homework to one of my classes and I am kind of regretting it now - trying to figure out "is that an R or a K?" for the different alleles they're working with is giving me a headache.

I have a colleague who's totally dumped doing homework. (He's kind of become bad-attitude-guy in the past year; part of it was he got a lot of plagiarized papers in one of his classes, part of it he's got a successful book out and I guess a contract on another one, so I think he has a short-timer mentality, that eventually he'll be able to chuck it all, tell us what he REALLY thinks of us, burn his bridges, and go live on advances and royalties.) But for now, he's trumpeting the damn "work smarter, not harder" propaganda that the b-school types love; for him, "working smarter" means sloughing off as much of the actual work of teaching as possible - including assigning papers or homeworks.

And it pisses me off on two levels, because first, I feel like a chump for continuing to spend HOURS reading students' cryptic scribblings, and second, he has free time to, like, write. And I'm expecting the "But the students in Professor Utonium's class don't have to do THIS!" complaints any day.

I don't know. I think working through mathematical analyses of problems, or figuring out the results of genetic test-crosses are valuable - it's not that I'm giving busy work - but a lot of times the students see it as such.

I'm getting fed up with the instant-gratification attitude that so many of them - hell, so many PEOPLE - have. The "it's tooooo haaaaaaaAAAAARRRdddd!" whines. Or the "But it's BORING!"

well, gut up, folks. There's a lot in life that's hard and boring. But you put up with it, you do it, and you don't do a half-assed job.

Even with grading. Even when you can't read what they've written and you suspect the tiny crabbed handwriting is a ruse to keep you from telling they've answered the question wrong.