When I first starting teaching at a high school, I didn’t think it was important or wise to spent countless hours hovering over student’s mistake-ridden exercises and painstakingly correcting each one. What a waste of manpower and precious time.
But while I was teaching English in Brazil, I learned that the joys of correcting homework and all other students’ exercises, are truly boundless. The first fact of the matter is: students love that. True students that is, who are serious about their learning experience. And it shows that you are a ‘true teacher’ if you take the time to manually comb through each exercise and pinpoint errors.
There could be a particular weakness on the student’s part which could have been only detected through looking through the exercises, and probably this weakness, left untreated, could debilitate the child for life in some areas of learning. What a hero you are for searching it out and erasing it, creating a better individual more prepared for the modern world.
It is certainly not boring. It depends on your mental attitude. Correcting homework can be a lot of fun. Every error you correct brings you good karma, in more ways than one. The student feels special and like he or she is treated on a personal level, rather than a statistic, a number in the masses.
Children want to know this: that you care, that they are cared for. And this is true for not just children, but adult students as well. Indeed, it can take up a considerable amount of time to address every error in every exercise, but this is time well spent, and certainly not lost in any way.
Usually, I’m such a powerful and imaginative ‘lecturer’ that I believed that this was the only way forward: standing in front of the classroom and talking strategically and engagingly for hours. That is good too. If you are like me and can churn out intriguing analogies to simplify the laws of science and concepts of grammar, that’s great. But remember, it is not ‘all’.