I think (as a Language Arts teacher in a mesivta) that teachers would actually have a really nice salary if we got paid for overtime.
For one thing, we have to create lessons and plan a schedule that factors in what if the copy machine breaks, and we have to do that outside of class time. The students get very impatient about it if we walk in unprepared.
“You have no lesson planned?”
“What? You don’t even want a lesson today.”
“Yeah, but you have none planned. What are we supposed to interrupt?”
And then there’s the marking of the papers. Obviously, as I have 4 classes, I try to stagger the assignments so I’m not marking several big things at once. But certain things can’t be staggered. For example, you always have a thousand papers to mark around the time of the final exam, and the final exam is the day before you have to hand in all the grades. That’s good planning on someone’s part.
Can I give my final exam early?
No. Then what are you going to do with the class afterward? You already called it a final exam!
I have to hand in the grades by the last day, so the principal can take half the summer to send out report cards. And I know this because halfway through the summer is when I suddenly get emails from parents.
“Hey, can you send me all the work so my son can do it NOW?”
“Well, he didn’t do it when everyone else was doing it, so what’s going to make him do it while everyone else is on summer vacation? Did he at least agree to do it?”
“I don’t know; he’s at camp.”
Marking papers takes forever. There are techniques to make it take less time, such as memorizing ten answers at a time and then running through everyone’s tests singing those ten answers again and again like a lunatic, until you realize you’ve been marking answers based on the paper of a student who got one answer wrong, and it’s not until about ten papers in that you wonder why everyone got that answer wrong except the first student.
And if enough students don’t do well on something, you resolve to make your lessons better for the next year, although that will not at all help this group of kids. You’ll have to write them off. But at least your improved lessons will explain things more, for future students. I’ve been teaching for 18 years, adding to my lessons every summer, and as a result, my lessons are really long. And most of what was added was to answer questions asked to me by previous classes who were probably just trying to kill time so we wouldn’t get to the worksheet.
And then if you’re a writing teacher, everyone expects you to mark essays. This is not like a test. A test has right answers and wrong answerers, whereas you cannot imagine how many ways there are for a student to do badly on an essay. One student may have written a story that he’s excited about and is sure you’re going to like, but a lot of it is lost in the fact that not a single word is spelled correctly. Another student spelled every word correctly, but there are only 13 words, and it put you to sleep. And another student wrote a 300-word essay, as required, but it took him 280 words to get to his topic, which he then covered in twenty words. And also he’s apparently never heard of this thing called… punctuation? And you have to give each of these a grade using the same numerical system, despite that they appear to have been written on different planets. One of them may not be human handwriting.
TEACHER TIP: Sometimes you can figure out what a word says by using the letters you do recognize to play Hangman with the rest. Good luck doing that if the words are spelled wrong.
And then, as a teacher, you have to write several paragraphs of notes in the margins of their essay, often with a higher word count than the essay itself; some kind of constructive criticism carefully written in an educational, positive way that the student is never going to read, although if you spell one word wrong in those paragraphs, you can be sure he’s going to find it.
“See? You make mistakes too!”
“Ok! Here’s me fixing my one mistake to make a better second draft. Your turn!”
“Do I get extra points for finding your mistake?”
“Do I get extra money for finding all of yours?”
The dumb thing is that after all the effort you put in marking a paper, in the end, the student ends up with roughly the same average that he had before you started marking the paper. Like why did I do this? In fact, you look at the student’s final mark, and whatever he got on the first paper you gave him that year is more or less his average for the whole rest of the year. You don’t even have to mark a paper; you just look at the kid’s name, and you give him the grade. No one’s going to improve after the first day; everyone walks in on that first day as motivated and inspired as they’re going to get. You don’t get a 30 on the first quiz in September and say, “I’m going to turn it on now. I was waiting until after Chanukah.” Maybe he’ll get a 32 at the end of the year, but he’s not getting 100. He’s going to walk in one day in the middle all motivated – probably right after conferences – and he’s going to say, “Wait, in order to understand today’s lesson we have to already know all the previous lessons?” and that’ll be it. He’s been in school for ten years, but he doesn’t know how lessons work.
Either way, whatever grade you give them, some of the students will contest it. These kids will fight you for a fraction of a point. Like he was supposed to add ten pieces of punctuation for one particular sentence on a worksheet, and he added 6, so you gave him half credit. But he wants 6 tenths. He expects you to take a worksheet with 33 questions, give him 6 tenths of 3 points for this question, 5 sevenths of 3 points for the next question, and add it all up. For each student. And this is a kid who himself is failing math. And after all that, over the course of the whole paper, he’s going to do better by two points, which over the entire term, will make zero difference on his report card, unless the students have their way and you only get to give out one or two worksheets.
Essays are worse, in that even if you can prove that what the student did was wrong, but because there are so many possible mistakes, it’s impossible to make a case for the numerical value that you assigned to that mistake.
Some students will bug you if their essays are anything less than 100. I wouldn’t give my own articles a 100.
“Why isn’t this 100?”
Honestly, I have no idea. I know I had a reason at the time, but I no longer remember that reason. I don’t even remember your essay, and I can’t read it right now al regel achas and try to remember what the reason was that I scribbled “97” when I was lying on the carpet at 3 in the morning after my back when out from hunching over essays and writing tiny comments in the margins.
Some teachers get away with just writing things like, “Vague.”
“Vague”? That’s vague. How was it vague?
I don’t know. I don’t remember. The comments are for me, for when they ask.
I say, “We can’t argue about this during class. Come to me after class.”
“I don’t want to spend time on this after class.”
When do you think I marked it?
I can’t even give back marked papers while they’re doing worksheets, because I’m needed, apparently. Also, once I start handing back papers, the students look over their papers while waiting for the next and immediately start contesting their grades while others are still waiting for me to give theirs back.
So I have to spend time before class organizing the papers by student. This way, I hand everyone a pile of about ten papers at once, and I specifically put their best mark on top, so I can buy myself time while they’re congratulating themselves for getting such a great mark on the one paper per term that I literally just gave 100s for.
And streamlining the process is work too. First you have to figure out which paper belongs to whom, when some people scribbled their names or didn’t take the time to write names at all. Those people probably spent a lot of time on the questions, though, right?
So then you have to do detective work. You check it against the pile of papers you just marked and say, “It has to be one of the following 3 people.” Sometimes it’s a sheet where all they had to do was add commas to pre-typed sentences. This is no one’s handwriting. The only handwriting would have been the name.
“Do these look like the way you make commas?”
“I don’t know. I don’t make commas, usually.”
“I know. Do you recognize the answers as what you might have written?”
“No, I copied them.”
Some sheets are easier than others. For example, it’s easy to figure out the worksheet on colons, because one guy just made semicolons.
And sometimes, all you have to go by is the grade.
“74? Yeah, that sounds like what I usually get. That’s what I got on the first paper of the year!”
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.