Dd in year 7 - how often should books be marked?

wolfiefan - not really. I'm on the equivalent of an old fashioned +5, as are two of my colleagues, and we still teach for 20 hours a week.

You don't lose much teaching time until you hit SLT and then the planning and assessment is replaced by other things.

I have extremely high standards, thank you, but I also have 2 dc under 4 and a very nice life. I think class sizes should be smaller in every school so the teacher can spend more time on every student - I've spent my entire career in state schools but I'm beginning to see the likeness to a sausage factory now.

I still wouldn't pay for my child to be in a class greater than 16 though, no matter what stage of schooling. I think the 'serious' time is KS3 as that's when making the two levels of progress is so vital, by the time they're in KS4 it's too late.

Through Q&A, presentations, application of knowledge to practical demonstrations, quizzes or time to teach a unit not heavy on the marking.

My school is very high performing but my HT knows that KS3 take a bit of a back seat marking wise in the run-in to exams. I still prepare, I hope, stimulating and challenging lessons (HT observed me last week) and I put in other modes of classroom assessment that meant I could mark the leaning tower of controlled assessment and exam timed essays in the evening. Am now caught up with KS3 classwork, am marking KS3 exams this half term, and writing reports when we get back.

I just had a thought. If the teacher doesn't mark the homework then how does he/she know if the pupil has understood the material?

Theroseofwait. If a teacher has had a series of big promotions they should have lower teaching load. I don't care how far up the scale a member of staff is, I still expect marking to be done. Marking informs lesson plans. There are times that I spend more time marking exam type work than books but I stand by my earlier comments and take pride in my professional standards.

re paying to be a class of 25, later on the class size comes down to about 10-15 when things get serious.

At the moment it is assumed that if you got through the entrance exam then in Year 7 no one is struggling and that Year 7 work doesn't require hand holding.

I understood danceswithyarn's point to mean if you gave a class a week to do their homework, then it should be marked and returned within a week, maybe I'm wrong.

I can honestly say marking is making my life miserable at the moment, I've had a hell of a time getting my very mixed ability year 11s through their public examination this year, and my ks3 marking has slipped. We should mark every two weeks but I have books that have not been touched since Easter, now our marking is being randomly sampled and I'm scared to go to work some days!!

I would like to offer anyone who think they can do it better a chance to come and work in a school for a week or so, we often have lovely ladies pop in because they quite like the idea of teaching children to cook and how hard can it be?! Fast forward 2 weeks later when they're too tired to stand up and wondering how on earth we do it. . .do PM me if anyone fancies it.

Wolfiefan I'm assuming if you have so much time you're either mainscale, or part time or both, I remember thinking like you early on my career and
a couple of big promtions later I completely understand, and Pooshtun if you're paying fees for your children to be in classes of 25, I'd be asking for a refund to be honest. . . . .

Kez!

Sounds like an idea of Son-of-Gove

Working on that (bonkers notion of spending as long marking each pieve as child takes to undertake task), as we are expected to set homework of 20-30 minutes (ave 25 let's say), with 275 students, that makes 6875 minutes, or 114.5 hours marking per week. Really?

I think Claire's question was to this (odd) comment: "I always thought that good manners would mean the same length of time for marking shod be taken but the teacher to mark work as they had given the dcs to do the work."

Claire - assuming that you are addressing your post to me, the homework is supposed to take 20min each. In practice it takes DS 45-60min.

Anyway, it should take the teacher about 5 min to mark. (read one A4 side essay, write comments and award a mark).

There are 25 kids per class and 150 kids in the year and a longer school day so its not as if one can use the excuse that its a private school.

I have a similar course load, 20 teaching hours/week, so that makes 66 hours/week contact +marking. how long would you like me to spend planning these lessons?

even assuming i can plan each lesson in 15 minutes, that is an extra 5 hours a week. do people really think that a 72 hour week is reasonable? really?

I have 3 x year 7 classes, 5 x year 8 classes, 3 x year 9 classes (no ks4 this year, thank goodness)

So, each class has 25-30 students, so a conservative of 275 altogether. Each half term is made of approx. 6 weeks, say 10 mins to mark each book, so 2750 minutes, is nearly 46 hours of marking. That's if I only mark each book once per half term. In reality, some get more and some get less, but weekly marking is not possible.

My school specifies books should be marked once a fortnight. Not marking homework devalues it. (I don't blame a student who then sees it as not important and does not do it!)
Sometimes students do a HW and then use it in class in a piece of work to be marked, occasionally it is for display and rewards given. It is hard to mark revision! My Y7 recently devised a quiz for HW. The marking was them trying the quiz in class and us discussing how it worked. I believe that most HW should be marked though.
Books not marked since March? June now! So if that student has completely misunderstood something then that has not been dealt with. I would say that is not on.
Re lack of time. I am afraid I would hit back with the idea better time management is called for (and yes I am a teacher!)

Do you mean that, say, the homework takes 20 minutes to do, the teacher should take 20 minutes to mark each student's work, or 20 minutes to mark the whole class' work?

I always thought that good manners would mean the same length of time for marking shod be taken but the teacher to mark work as they had given the dcs to do the work.

Who said anything about being spoon fed? I was talking about motivating children.

l don't expect 11 year olds to respond to an environment when they are told to spend their non school time studying for something and then not to get any individual feedback at all.

Anyway, as I've said, I'm glad that my kids are at a place where the teachers share my values.

No, but a greater expectation of pupils to take charge of their learning, and not to be spoon fed everything.

oulucky - You obviously have a superior class of children in Germany.

I teach English.

School policy is to mark books every fortnight. In practice, that usually becomes once or twice, depending on where assessed pieces of work fall, during each half term, & then again over the holidays, when I always get all books up to date. So 'worst case scenario' would be 3 weeks.

Having said that, in the run up to GCSEs, I might well set a practice essay question for both my year 11 groups (55 students). Marking & giving detailed feedback on that alone would then take me 6-10 hours, so three evenings' work - at which point the KS3 marking takes a hit, I'm afraid.

If students have done work which needs an assessment level/grade, it always gets marked & returned well within the fortnight - if it's a case of 'flick & tick'ing notes or preparation work, that's when it goes on the back burner.

Well ideally you'd hope they would do the homework to advance their learning not to get merits...

Ouluckyduck I think I may have to move to Germany!

We have a state secondary school at the top of our road which is rated quite highly by OFSTED and local parents. When my DS was in Year 5 I asked my neighbour (her DC goes there) for the inside track. She was saying that the homework was rarely marked. So mentioned this at the parents evening and the teachers that she spoke to all had the standard line i.e. not enough time to regularly mark 30 sets of homework.

We spoke to parents with DCs at other schools and they said the same thing about their schools.

I accept the points put forward by posters here i.e. 30 x 5 mins x several classes = large chunk of your time but my neighbour was saying that once her DC realised that the homework most likely wasn't going to get marked, the DC stopped putting much effort into it. So if homework isn't going to get marked then there isn't much in setting it in the first place.

There were other reasons but this was was one of the main reasons why we decided to privately educate our DCs. They get 3 pieces of homework most days and they always gets marked. As a result DCs puts lots of effort into it so that they can earn Merits.

As a German, and a former teacher, I think that the marking of books is utter madness. When I was a teacher I had over 250 students. If I spent 5 mins on every book that was 20 hours a week just on marking books! In Germany books were never marked. Homework was discussed in class and then self-marked.

My DD is in year 8 and her books are taken in and marked on a weekly basis.

She seems to have a weekly timetable where homework is set, handed in, marked and returned with helpful comments.