Why Marking Short Stories Makes Me Miserable

I don’t like marking short stories. I love assigning them: the students have the opportunity to be creative and original, and use a number of very important tools in their Language Arts tool chest. But marking these pieces is terrible for so many reasons.

One is that, since students are only between, generally speaking, 13 and 18, their work is in many cases quite rough. Some haven’t quite mastered the idea of a SHORT story, either, so their writing experiment goes on for quite some time. Also, being young, many miss important editing and revising, making me feel, as I read page after page of horrifying English abuses, like a complete teaching failure. This is depressing and demoralizing and I dislike it.

Another reason is simply that this marking process is incredibly time consuming. I spend, on most pieces, up to half an hour a piece. When I have 75 pieces over three classes to mark, the time required adds up.

The third reason I don’t like marking these pieces, and the most significant I think, is that it’s incredibly difficult to assign a numeric value on writing of this type. We English teachers strive to be objective, as objective as possible in our field, there is nevertheless an undeniable level of subjectivity. “Form”, for instance, is one of the areas I mark the stories for. At times, it’s quite difficult for me to say whether a student has used “excellent” form, or merely “good”. Sometimes it’s a clear “4” out of 5, but sometimes the lines are fairly blurry. The difference between one piece utilizing “superior skill” in language and arrangement, while another uses “effective skill” can be small indeed. And when the topics and styles are so vastly different, it’s tricky to be completely confident in my assessment.

I have tried, mind you. I use, for each piece, a very detailed rubric, which should make marking these pieces simple. But when dealing with creative works, there is very little simplicity about the marking. And students also take these marks very personally, since many of them can’t help but feel I am marking them, personally, as opposed as simply marking their writing. Because creative works like stories are so filled with personality and can become so personal to the writers, receiving a mark on a short story, especially a low one, can hurt. And that’s quite hard for me as well.

So, here I sit, trying to mark these short stories, and feeling sick about the whole thing (as usual). I love this assignment, but I so hate the marking of it. Sometimes I think Alfie Kohn was onto something. Most of the time I don’t but sometimes… sometimes I do.