Previously, I never understood why it takes teachers so long to give feedback. I felt annoyed when I would take a test and not get back my results the day after. It wasn't until I had the responsibility to mark the students' work that I understood. On Seesaw, each student had submitted two stories they had written on that particular week. With 20 students in class, that would mean me reading 40 stories in total. I tried my hardest to leave feedback; for the first few stories, I was able to let them know what I enjoyed in their story and what they could improve on to make their stories better. After a while, I stopped leaving them verbal feedback. Instead, I just left them a heart emoji. This signified to the students that I had viewed their work, but I felt bad because I was depriving them of feedback that could help improve their learning. I was thankful that students could only see their work, and not others because then they would know that others had feedback while some didn't.

In the future, to help myself navigate feedback I should definitely set aside a specific time to help myself focus on the task at hand. I think the reason why I stopped giving feedback, is because I didn't properly pace myself. I waited until the end of the week to tackle reading all the students' stories, so I could get it over with. Therefore, instead of waiting trying to do it all at once, I should reserve 30-45 minutes of my time to give myself time to give them feedback and prevent myself from burnout. I should also make sure I shouldn't overthink. I think another factor that caused me to stop giving verbal feedback was because I would overthink what to say. I wanted each student to have different feedback, but it wasn't until later that I understood that it's okay for some students to have the same feedback. It doesn't mean that I'm being repetitive, it just means that some students have similar weaknesses, so oftentimes they also need similar feedback. For the assessments that require a simple "check", I would definitely try to incorporate a fun, new way to let the students know their work is complete and correct. Since those types of feedback are easy to do, I would like to try giving them stickers as a sign they did their work well. Students will be motivated to do their work and will get to physically see they did a job well done!