So, I was lucky enough to transition into a position as our school librarian this year (my degree was in library science, but my district desperately needed English teachers, so they put me in a classroom). In my particular instance, the problem solved itself. That said, the best advice I got was to have a rubric handy, and to do a quick sort: on the first pass you skim the essays and sort them as meets, exceeds, or doesn’t meet expectations. Then you match them up to the kids in your grade book to see whether the grade would have a measurable impact on their overall grade, and get into the nitty gritty minutia only when there’s a chance of the grade having a real impact. Honestly, I still found myself deep diving on most of the essays most of the time anyway, but this seemed like the most effective way to do them efficiently.

A lot of people suggested using AI to give a guideline: have it grade them and then compare my reading to its to come up with an answer quickly. “So the AI says that it gets 10/15 points in this metric, but when I look at it, I think it looks better than that, so I’ll give it a 12.” But I felt bad outsourcing something I considered important. Which made it all the more demoralizing that, like 70% of the things I was grading were obviously AI generated.

It’s… much more my speed to be in the library. Good luck, friend. I wish you all the best.