Grade Quizzes

Twenty-four quizzes go into the folder on Friday afternoon. Short ones — six questions on equivalent fractions, the kind you can mark in forty minutes with a coffee. You have prep first thing Monday. That is the plan, and it is a good one.

Monday’s prep goes to a meeting about a student who needs more than any one of you can give him on your own. It is the right way to spend the time. The folder stays in the bag, the bag comes home, and on Tuesday morning it goes back to school again.

On Tuesday a girl at the front asks whether you have checked them yet. You say not yet, soon. On Wednesday a boy asks. You say the same thing, and mean it both times, and by Thursday you have said it four times to four different children who all wanted the same small piece of information about themselves.

Here is what the stack is actually costing, and it is not the forty minutes. You wrote that quiz to find out who had not got it — that was the whole point of it — and for four days you have taught the next thing, and the thing after that, on top of a gap you cannot see. The paper in the bag is the answer to a question you needed on Monday.

You mark them Thursday night at the kitchen table, and three children in that pile needed you to know on Friday.