Clearing the Way

Before reading this book by Tom Romano the only grading of papers I had experience with was from high school and very little from pervious college classes. I never agreed with the way that my papers were graded because it never seemed far that they were grading my on my thoughts and opinions and telling me that those were wrong. So going into English education I was scared that I would have students who felt the same way when I grade their papers in the future.

After reading clearing the way all those worries seemed to just disappear. Romano has very good ideas and thoughts about what and how to grade students work that I found very helpful. I think he hit a bullseye when he said that students first look at the grade they received and then the comments, but I really like how he focuses his attention more on the story the students write and not the grammatical side of it. While grading the story he looks more for the creative part of it like the use of wording and vivid imagery. I think this is a very fair way to grade the papers. I think that if students are repeating words and not trying to expand their vocabulary while writing that is something we can mark down for. It shows the student that they are writing well and they have a good story but just try to broaden their words up.

To him the only thing that matters more than the grade is the quality of the writing. He gives his students their own voice which has seemed to have a positive effect on his students and he strives for his students to write the best that they can.

This book was very useful because I feel like I share some of the same views on this topic as does Romano. There was a lot of very helpful tips and tricks to help teacher’s grade papers and I think that I will be using most of them in the future. This was definitely a helpful book to read in class and I will for sure be keeping this book with me throughout my teaching career.

 Here is an article that I found about tips for grading and giving feedback that I thought was helpful.