Blast from the Past: November 1990 on grading theme by Jean Ellis

2024 Introduction & Reflection 
By Beth Carlson, Nationally Board Certified Teacher/English Department Chair at RSU21, Kennebunk High School, [email protected], current MCELA Executive Board Member, and past president of MCELA

Having just assigned theme papers to my freshman honors level class, I am feeling hard what Jean M. Davis wrote about in 1990. However, having just come back from the NCTE conference where I attended Sarah Zerwin's workshop on humane grading, I am not going to agonize over my students' grades. I will make comments and offer them a revision opportunity.

Zerwin recommends learning progressions, which she outlines in her new book, Step Aside: Strategies for Student-Driven Learning with Secondary Readers and Writers, where she advocates that students should not only do the work but use the learning progressions to track their progress.  I can't wait to order this book and read more.  The workshop gave me a vision of the possibilities teachers can enact that put  the onus of the work on students and then their grades rise out of their effort.  Zerwin teaches high school, but she presented with middle school teachers who use this method as well.  Rigor, after all, doesn't mean much if students don't have to think about their work again, and–if you can accept a little cynicism here–if they're thinking critically about how to revise writing done by chatGPT, that's progress, too.  It's also another workshop (or two) I attended at NCTE.  
–Beth Carlson, Current MCELA Executive Board Member and English Teacher at Kennebunk High School

Blast from the Past, November 1990
By Jean M. Davis 

Barbara Ellis, formally a Maine high school English teacher and now a faculty member in the journalism Department at Oregon State University, Corvallis Oregon, recently completed her doctoral thesis in a subject pertinent to MCELA members. Ellis has researched the major factors inhibiting English teachers in the area of theme assessment. Ellis speculates at the onset of her study that "most English teachers are not aware of the high cost of assessment's consequences, in terms of dollars, in terms of its behavioral, attitude, physical, and emotional effects in educators themselves." 

Theme assessment, Ellis notes, cannot be done with a checklist or a multiple-choice evaluation form. Rather, it requires "thoughtful judgment and marks and comments that will be meaningful to the student writer." A teacher with 125 students, spending only ten minutes per composition, will devote at least twenty hours in assessing one theme assignment. 

Ellis sent questionnaires to one-third of Oregon's high school English teachers. She received responses from 62% of the samples. She asked fifty-eight questions dealing with such matters as the number of years the respondent has been correcting themes, whether emphasis is placed on specific writing skills in each theme, the number of themes corrected per month, the number of hours per month spent correcting themes, the amount of teacher commentary (if any) written on corrected themes, and the teacher's correcting system. 

Ellis, in her questionnaire, then moves on to more emotional issues involved in the theme valuation: Do you think correcting themes is or is not related to burnout of high school English teachers? How many hours before fatigue begins to set in? Do the demands of the home outside life affect the quality of our theme correcting? Do you think most teachers find theme correcting to be an enjoyable or irksome part of teaching English? Do you or do you not sometimes feel despair in correcting themes when you assign students making the same errors you have pointed out to them in  previous themes? Do you or do you not sometimes feel resentment over the workload of English teachers compared to those in other high school disciples? 

Of Ellis's 283 respondents, 170 have been correcting themes for eleven to twenty years. One hundred seventeen report an average of 21-25 students per class, and most of the respondents assign two or four themes per month. One hundred forty respondents evaluate more than 150 themes per month; 53 respondents estimate that they spend more than 50 hours per month on these evaluations. Ellis's English teachers feel (as do, no doubt, more English teachers) that other requirements of the course leave insufficient time to teach theme writing. Many feel that having a theme reader in one's English department would enable English teachers to assign more theme writing. Not surprisingly, 245 respondents feel that correcting themes is related to burnout of high school English teachers. Two hundred forty-six say that fatigue affects theory evaluation judgment in correcting themes, and 145 say that they can put in two hours at a single sitting of correcting themes before fatigue begins to set in. The demands of home outside life affect the quality of theme correcting in 223 cases. One hundred fifty-six of the 283 Oregon teachers find theme writing to be an irksome part of teaching English.
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Ellis's thesis concluded with the open-ended response of the survey' participants. While many  expressed much  self-confidence in their ability to evaluate  student writing accurately, one cannot help but see that English teachers are overwhelmed by the enormity of the theme-evaluation task: 
- "too many other responsibilities to spend time needed to return papers soon." 
- "I spend too much time agonizing over a letter grade." 
- "Remaining objective is difficult. Stressed out by  paper load." 
- "I become resentful of seeing my family involved in activities while I'm correcting the last 40 essays!" 
- "Grading themes requires hours of intellectual alertness that other kinds of grading do not demand." 
One Oregon English Teacher, in response to Ellis's request for suggestions for beginning English teachers, offered: "'Be a P.E. Teacher."