I am a grader this semester. At first, it seems to be a boring, tedious job. In fact, it usually is. But I do appreciate the lessons I have during grading.

  • For big projects, students naturally want to do as fast as possible. However, they want to jump right into the code because they think that is the only work needed. A lot fall to the trap of not knowing what they are programming for. Some are more mindful, deliberately took a step back, voluntarily spending some time for something that is not explicitly stated in the assignment description. Those students are usually who perform the best. (I saw their process via their project summary document.)

  • I realized I also rush towards many things. Me learning Latex (a typesetting language for math documents) was one example. At that time, I think it should be easy and a good student like me should not be delayed by it. Of course, I kept hitting the wall by blindly writing things that I don’t quite understand and hope it compiles. After a while, I had to admit that I am not good at Latex syntax yet, and humbly went through the most basic tutorials on Overleaf. And that what actually made up of the majority of my latex understanding then.

  • This applies to many other things that we usually don’t want to do: reading about a past topic again even when we have learned it a while ago or admitting that we don’t actually understand something (Pytorch? Linux commands? Python? English writing rules?). The more basic the skills are, the harder it is to admit that we are not good at it. Therefore, such an admittance requires strategic thinking, humility, and perserverance.

Anyway, while grading, I want to take time to encourage the goods in the students, which I found very warming during my undergrad time. People in hustle culture sometimes ignore that humane thing when giving feedback.