Curb your Grading Procrastination with HOGA
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It’s a new year, and many of us consider (and quickly dismiss or fail at) resolutions for the year. Here’s a resolution that, if followed, will help you feel more at peace until the end of the school year.
Those of us who teach know that the grading piles up – and the more it piles up, the more guilty we feel. We don’t enjoy our evenings, we don’t enjoy our weekends. We experience a sense of dread that just multiplies the longer we procrastinate the task. The trick is to break the cycle of dread.
One year, a teaching friend and I co-invented HOGA, which stands for Hour of Grading Accountability. We decided to treat grading like participating in a Yoga class or an hour at the spa. We used each other as accountability partners to commit to spending one hour Sunday – Thursday catching up on grading (for a total of 5 hours a week).
To make our experience more pleasant, we sent each other pictures of our “HOGA perks” like a favorite cup of tea, or a dessert to enjoy after completion of our hour. We went to coffee shops. We sat in comfy chairs. We invented things to accompany grading to make it more enjoyable. But every day, we texted each other to say “I did my HOGA today” and that kept us going.
An interesting thing happened. When grading proactively for one hour every day, we paid more attention to what students were learning and to the missing concepts that we needed to emphasize in class. We felt more of a connection to the students. And we stopped feeling the constant dread that there were tons of papers to grade. It felt like we were finally back in control of our lives.
As the CEO of Socrait, I invented a similar practice called “Misery Loves Company” (MLC) – there are various tasks that nobody can bring themselves to just do, regardless of how important they are. For example: reading a patent (blech), writing a Digital Privacy Agreement for a state (double blech), or completing end-of-year tax returns (triple blech).
So we schedule an MLC meeting, where all the meeting participants bring their most-likely-to-be-procrastinated task (we determine the tasks ahead of time). And then we join a zoom and sit in silence, each working on our own hard-to-complete task. Usually, in one hour we are all done with the procrastinated task and wondering why on earth we put it off for so long. If you’re a principal, MLC meetings are very likely going to be your version of HOGA!
I don’t have an “official HOGA partner” this year, but I do still have grading to do. Maybe some of you will join me on TikTok to be my accountability partner for HOGA in 2026. Together we can turn grading into a peaceful daily ritual instead of something we push off for days and then suffer through in marathon grading sessions. And honestly, I’d love to see all your scrappy teacher-creative ways to turn grading into a spa-like experience.
Inbox Serotonin
As a teacher (or principal) sometimes you just need a good laugh about the creativity of our profession. Here’s a TikTok post with 5000+ comments containing “Clever Consequences for Student Behavior” from Mr. Lidd.
The highest comment on the post is from Mrs D in Chemistry: “’I’ve been saying I’m going to tell Santa. They’re high schoolers. They are very offended by this and immediately start acting right 😂 it’s like the password to awakening sleeper agents.”
The post that made me laugh out loud over the holidays was this one about the reality of what this simple childhood toy was really teaching us from knowyourmeme.
New Year, New Socrait Features!
For those of you who are new to Socrait, let me give you a short introduction. Socrait is your classroom companion. It listens to you while you teach and gives you back your data after class, giving your brain time to breathe during the day. After class, Socrait will draft your parent emails, create class summaries for absent students, help you remember where that class left off, and remember your spoken aloud to-dos.
We started the new year by releasing an archive feature so that those of you who are about to have a different set of classes and students can switch over. Archiving will get a class out of the dropdown menu in the phone app, but leave the data available to you to access. If you’re looking to archive a class, you can find it in the Class Editing interface for the class: How to Archive a Class in Socrait.
We also released View All for Reminders – this allows you to see all your to-dos from the classroom in one place. As a reminder, you don’t need to do anything special to populate the reminders list – just “remind yourself” about anything out loud.
Examples that become Task Reminders automatically:
“I need to remember to separate Nathan and Liam on the seating chart.”
“Remind me to move the assignment deadline to Friday.”
“Don’t forget to bring coal for the holiday party tomorrow.”
About the author: Dr. Maria Andersen has been an educator for 30 years in both Higher Ed and K-12 teaching a variety of subjects (math, chemistry, business, ELL, technology, pre-service teachers). She has given hundreds of workshops and keynotes about active learning, curriculum redesign, remote and online learning, effective use of technology, and using AI for teaching & learning. Andersen teaches middle schoolers at a charter school in Utah. She was also the CEO of Coursetune and is currently the CEO of Socrait.