Swimming in a sea of papers

This week my students turned in their first drafts of a narrative. Unlike my previous experience of teaching comp, I am working on hammering home the revision process. Students first composed a narrative for peer review, which seemed more like an opportunity for them to read each other’s work and introduce them to other points of view as opposed to getting substantial feedback. So, I asked them to revise their narratives based on the comments they received from their peer editors, and turn in another draft to me for my comments. Ultimately, they will turn in a portfolio with 3 drafts of the same work. I am hoping that this process will show them how their writing improved or changed composing one assignment. I’m interested to see how this works from my perspective meaning I’ll have to read 100 narratives twice. I figure, I will complete roughly 66 hours of commenting before I return the “final draft” with a grade. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with this right now as a lot of my students are ESL, and I’m still trying to put my finger on a best practice in addressing issues in their papers. So it goes…
For my next entry, I want to turn my attention to two important comments some of my friends have made about my blog thus far: the question of anonymity and airing dirty laundry, and defining adjunct. The former comes from direct comments on my blog, and the latter from a discussion I had with a friend of mine who ask me what adjuncting means. I look forward to thinking and writing about those questions some more when I’m not swimming in a sea of narratives.