Correcting Essays Using an Objective Formula: The Circle Method

The Intro: After 25 years of teaching high school English, during which time I attended numerous in-services and workshops on how to correct essays, I still did not have a foolproof method to objectively grade papers. (Every few years people who didn't teach English had a new philosophy on how to correct papers, but after instituting these novel approaches, my colleagues and I noticed the essays rarely seemed to get any better, and usually the opposite occurred.) I wanted to be able to put an 82 on an essay, and have any other teacher correct that same essay and come up with the same grade. I was also sick and tired of the 15-year-old "lawyers" in my classroom who felt it was their right to argue for every last point in entitled attempts to inch their grades higher, and their parents were even worse! In the last several years, the essay grades and the fighting for those grades, but not the writing and proofreading skills, became the paramount concerns. I was worn out with generalized rubrics. I also knew from over two decades of experience, most teenagers can not proofread their own papers and find mistakes, let alone be helpful editors for their classmates; unfortunately, peer editing, as good as it sounds, usually does not work. Most classes have only a few good proofreaders, and of course, their peers want the good proofreaders for their essays, while the marginal students "bring nothing to the table," and are of little assistance to their peer-editing partners. I also realized that for some students I was spending more time on their essays than they were! As an "Honors" English teacher, I longed to walk out of the school in the afternoon with nothing in tow but my pocketbook or lunch bag, but instead, I had a backpack full of essays that consumed my evenings, weekends and holiday vacations. This finally led me to create my own method for grading essays; I call it "The Circle Method," and it has worked like a charm. A sample paragraph & KEY are provided.