Notes From The Education Underground: The TeachWonk Diaries

Another Brick
A Math Lesson

A colleague of mine that teaches language arts was telling me the other day that she had to grade some five paragraph persuasive essays. Here was a piece of our conversation:

• TeachWonk: "How many essays did you grade?"
• L.A. Teacher: "I looked at 174 papers."
• TeachWonk: "How long did it take?"
• L.A. Teacher: "I spent about an hour and a half."
• TeachWonk: "Was that all?"
• L.A. Teacher: "Yeah"

So lets do a little math: If we take the number of minutes in an hour and one half (90) and divide by the number of student papers (174) we get: 31 seconds for a single essay.

Who says that large class sizes don't make a difference?