Listening to podcasts to keep myself grading…

We’re in the middle of week 33 here, close to interim time of Q4, and only a handful of days away from the AP Calculus BC exam. I just finished getting caught up on my last batch of grading, and I won’t be loading up my expandable folder again this year because there’s not too much left to grade for AP Calculus.

Over April break, my expandable file was bursting with classwork, quizzes, and tests I needed to get through. As I was trying to get myself caught up again, I tried listening to a podcast while I graded. I’m not sure how I never tried this technique before, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I didn’t even listen to podcasts until this year. It was truly life-changing! I do a lot of my grading later in the evenings after my kids are in bed, and although I can sometimes lock in and focus until close to 11pm, most nights I find my mind wandering as I trudge through the never-ending piles of tests and quizzes. Even though I am going through papers and moving them from the “non-graded” to the “graded” pile, it really seems like the “non-graded” pile doesn’t shrink. While grading, I think of errands I need to do, tasks I want to quickly get done, day trips I want to plan, literally anything besides the task at hand! Once I open my laptop and pursue a thought that pops into my head, what typically happens in an hour flies by and then I’m too tired to grade anymore.

This is not at all my experience with lesson planning and creating curriculum, worksheets, activities, etc. I LOVE lesson planning. I have spent hours at a time at my desk not moving, completely wrapped up in the creative process of trying to plan the perfect lesson, editing the worksheet until it looks perfect, sequencing the events so they make the most sense to students, figuring out how to effectively use every minute of my 47-minute class period.

Grading? Not so much.

I know I could quickly resolve this issue by just giving multiple choice assessments with GradeCam, but one of my main goals is to help students improve their notation, mathematical communication, and organization of thoughts. This cannot be done without open-ended problems and poring over their work. I spend a lot of time leaving comments of feedback and following small errors to award partial credit for valid mathematical processes. I could also solve this by using an alternate method of grading, like standards-based grading, which I wanted to do this year. For many reasons, that hasn’t happened yet.

So anyways, listening passively to a podcast seemed to calm down my mind and prevent my thoughts from wandering. Time didn’t seem to drag on as much. Even though I was listening to words, I wasn’t distracted and was still able to focus fully on grading. I am not able to maintain a full conversation with a person when I grade, but that’s because I know they will expect me to really listen and then respond, and that is too distracting. With a podcast, I can tune out here and there and there is never a need for me to respond or confirm I heard something. The podcast that I’ve been binging this month is ‘Everything’s Canceled.’ The two hosts cover a new person each week and they do an excellent job of narrating stories about the person while also offering their own personal commentary.

I fully support the process of grading and I know that receiving personalized feedback is an essential part of the learning process. If you also find yourself struggling to get through mountains of grading, try turning on a podcast and see if it helps!