Well, for every success, there are some failures; and this exchange process has certainly proven this edict to be true. While I was quite pleased with myself for having marked (graded) all the Year 10 top set coursework essays on Great Expectations; spending hours reading, re-reading, annotating, and commenting in detail - as it turns out - not quite up to snuff! Sitting down with Melanie last week, and reviewing several of the essays I had graded, it turns out that the mark scheme, (a rubric - but ten times more complicated than I normally use) is still completely foreign to me! I miserably failed at grading these essays - well, maybe that's a harsh criticism of myself - but with only two weeks left to go in the exchange, it became apparent that it would not be possible to go back and recorrect these essays, so sad to say, they will be unfinished business left behind.
On the bright side - I apparently, and this will be of no surprise to anyone back home, have been especially harsh and critical in my grading of these essays, in some cases marking two grades below what Mel's trained and skillful eye assessed as the student performance on a handful of randomly selected essays. I have not overmarked, but I have apparently severely undermarked - again, no surprise to anyone back home, certainly not my students, as they are accustomed to harsh, albeit fair, grading of essays and projects; but I have a seriously high standard of expectations and this has been to my detriment on this particular set of essays, as it has been difficult for me to compartmentalize the reading, literature and grammar aspects of "marking" on this side of the pond.
In some cases, even though an essay is not particularly well-written or organized - if that is not part of the mark scheme one is to "ignore" those aspects and look only for the "insight" and "analysis" - at home I wouldn't consider that there is much difference in these ideas, but here there definitely is - albeit a fine line at that. At home, if an essay is not grammatically in line and not organized, this too seriously affects the grade earned.
Therefore, viewing this entire exercise in an optimistic light, I instructed these students brilliantly, as their essays are much better than I gave them credit for, and even some of the lowest achieving students in the class have apparently achieved a C on this essay! Yay!
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