Grading can be the bane of any teacher’s existence, especially when it’s not just a matter of comparing a bubble sheet to an answer key. A teacher can spend more mental energy grading a paper or a proof or a problem or a project than the student spent doing it.
David Allen’s popular productivity system “Getting Things Done” (GTD) has at least some concepts that can help with this task, a task unique to the profession of teaching. Much of what GTD recommends would help any disorganized person: get a physical inbox, buy some great filing cabinets and plenty of file folders, make sure that you write down every single task or idea in a place where you will be sure to see it, take full advantage of software and shiny gadgets. If you feel generally disorganized, then any organizational system, including this one, might help. But GTD is specifically intended for people whose work, like that of a teacher’s, is potentially infinite:
“Most people I know have at least half a dozen things they’re trying to achieve right now, and even if they had the rest of their lives to try, they wouldn’t be able to finish these to perfection. You’re probably faced with the same dilemma. How good could that conference be? How effective could the training program be, or the structure of your executives’ compensation package? How inspiring is the essay you’re writing? How motivating the staff meeting? How functional the reorganization? And a last question: How much available data could be relevant to doing those projects “better”? The answer is, an infinite amount, easily accessible, or at least potentially so, through the Web” (p. 5).
The fact that Allen has been working mainly with managers and executives is clear, but it should be equally clear that teachers have the same problem of potentially infinite excellence. Say that I want to do something as simple as “Teach Bobby to use commas.” I could spend days on that single task: reading up on all the latest comma-teaching research, trying first one method and then another to find the one best suited for Bobby’s individual learning style, testing and retesting to make sure Bobby is retaining the lesson and honing the skill. Bobby surely needs to learn other things as well, and of course there are probably a dozen or ten dozen other Bobbys for whom I am partly responsible at any given moment.
This “infinity issue” becomes particularly acute for me, I find, during two activities: writing (don’t ask me how long this article took me) and grading. Say that Bobby turns in a paper on World War Two for my History class, and I see at once that his knowledge of World War One is decidedly deficient. Moreover, he doesn’t know how to use commas (see above!), and I can see a lot of grammar errors, and he doesn’t know the difference between primary and secondary sources, and he cited Wikipedia inappropriately, and I strongly suspect he thinks Winston Churchill was the king of England. What can I do? He was supposed to learn those things elsewhere, but clearly he didn’t. I could give him individual tutoring, but I don’t have the time, and in any case most of those topics are outside the purview of the course. In GTD terms, what has happened is that a whole slew of “open loops” have been created in my mind. According to David Allen, “open loops” are “anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is,” and these nagging problems are constantly “being tracked by a less-than-conscious part of you” (p. 12). Thus: stress.
The GTD remedy for the stress caused by open loops in the subconscious is basically to get them out of the subconscious onto a piece of paper or digital equivalent, then to collect them into a place where you will be sure to see them (developing such a system is a major part of the book), and then to make conscious decisions that close the loops. Some tasks and ideas will turn into actions to be done, others will be thrown away, saved for later, or delegated, but nothing will slip through the cracks, hanging around radiating a menacing aura of incompleteness. The subconscious mind is then relieved of its stress. (A famous application of this process to e-mail is called “Inbox Zero.”)
I once had the interesting experience of reading through a huge stack of student applications for a program I wasn’t affiliated with; what I noticed was that the experience (unlike that of grading) was utterly stressless, even though the pile was easily twice as large as an average pile of papers to be graded. It was relatively easy to decide whether a particular application should go in the “yes,” “maybe,” or “no” pile, and then to keep processing the piles until I had only two: “yes” and “no.” Seeing applicants’ errors was stress-free, because I wasn’t responsible for teaching the applicants not to make them. The loops were easy to close.
But it’s harder to close those open loops while grading: with limited time and energy, what can I do about Bobby’s commas? Sure, I can write “Commas!!!” in the margin, but a part of me knows that that’s no help at all. The loop stays open. It’s easy to get distracted and frustrated while grading; it can be like trying get to a particular destination by driving down a highway lined with smoking wrecks and bleeding people.
Well, if you can’t stop every half a mile to give CPR and wrap tourniquets, you can at least write down the milepost numbers and call 911 when you get where you’re going. In other words, here are three ideas based on the GTD system about how to close the unconscious open loops that grading student work can create in a teacher’s mind:
Make and maintain a list of “Things to Learn” for every individual student.
I’ve heard of cases where, for instance, the history teacher has openly castigated the English teacher for not teaching Bobby what he should have learned by now. (Certainly there’s a lot of private complaining that goes on.) That might help to close an open loop in your mind, to be sure, but it probably won’t affect that other teacher’s practice: he’s probably doing the best he can in any case. A better way to close the loops caused by grading is simply to make and maintain a list for every student of “Things to Learn,” and then decide what concrete action to take about the items on that list. You might refuse to grade the assignment until the student has learned those things, or you might require the student to learn them before the next assignment, or you might give the list to the student’s parents, or you might give the list to the student before she leaves your class, or you might publish it in the local paper, or put it on the web, or send it to the school board — whatever will ease your mind and give you a sense of completion. Or, of course, you can choose some or all of those unlearned lessons and commit to teaching them to that student.
Regularly review the individual lists of “Things to Learn” and move commonalities into a list of “Things to Teach.”
Plenty of teachers do this kind of thing already, of course, going in to class the next day and saying, “It’s apparent from your homework that many of you didn’t understand the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: let’s review.” But David Allen suggests that there’s a significant organizational and psychological benefit to developing the habit of “externalizing” such insights into lists. Again, what you do with the lists you make is entirely up to you: you could use them in your current class or use them for version 2.0 of your lesson plan or make a conscious decision not to teach any of it. The important thing is to collect, review, and take some action on the information.
Make lists of websites or other resources that students can consult.
Recommending a $45.00 dictionary to a student who writes “to a certain extinct” probably wouldn’t be any more effective than commenting “Wrong word!” in the margin of a paper, but directing her to Merriam-Webster.com, or teaching him to type “define:” into Google, or giving her this list of student bloomers might actually have an effect. Heck, even making your own list of hilarious and frustrating student errors might help to clear your mind. And there are are always some students who would genuinely like to know where to go to get some help, whether that’s to Strunk and White or to a writing tutor that you recommend.
At this point you might be saying, “Enough with all the lists!” But one of the main things that technology can do for us is make it easy to manage documents. Technology may not save time, but it certainly saves space. Even if you have eighty students, it’s not difficult to start a simple text file for each one and keep it in a folder. But plain paper or index cards would be fine, too, as would sophisticated-but-simple note-taking applications such as Evernote, which allows for powerful searching and cross-indexing. For beginning teachers, especially, starting the habit of keeping such rich files can be a real help: over the years it will develop into an enviable archive. And sooner than that, it might develop into an even more enviable “mind like water” that ripples with peace. -AMANDA FRENCH
David Allen. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. New York: Viking, 2001.
Robert Talbert, associate professor of mathematics and computer science, writes about teaching and GTD on his blog “Casting Out Nines.”
Related stuff:
Get your e-mail inbox down to zero
Get everything done. (Maybe).
Evernote: Never forget anything ever again. Ever.
BY BILL FERRIS
BY 
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