For teachers, grading can feel like an unending task. The EZ Grader promised to make this job easier. Using this tool, teachers selected the grade based on the number of correct answers as a quick reference. It also allowed graders to quickly find the average class score.
Robyn Buskirk has been a teacher for over 20 years. At the start of her career all the teachers she admired carried around the EZ Grader. She originally bought one for a friend, but then someone gifted her one as well. Such a simple tool gave her a sense of accomplishment and pride. When she started using the grader, she said, “This is when I knew I made it.”
Listen to Robyn’s story in her own words:
This object is part of the “Transitions” section of the Artifacts of Experience exhibition designed by University of Cincinnati students in the “Introduction to Public History” course in 2023.
We encourage you to explore the other objects in our collection.
Transcript
Sydney Tompkins [ST]: What is your object?
Robyn Buskirk [RB]: So my object is actually this weird thing called an easy grader. Which sounds really weird. You wondering what it is, I am wondering what it is. So it’s one of those weird things that teachers have when they’re grading things. And you can pull the slider and it tells you like the percentage or whatever. But when I was like student teaching, I thought that was like the coolest thing that the teachers had in the building. And it was like, I need one of those. And so when I finished student teaching, and I got my first teaching job, it was the first thing I bought. And so my object is the easy grader that I bought the first year I got hired as a teacher.
[ST]: And what does it mean to you?
[RB]: I guess it means, I guess it’s a symbol of like, everything I worked for in college and everything I wanted to be like I had finally made it. The object itself is just a piece of paper that looks so worn and awful. But it just kind of felt like that’s what I needed. And it’s so funny because now it symbolizes how much teaching has changed in the past 25 years. Like there’s no reason to use one of those. Again, the technology is way way different. Like when I first started, we didn’t even have a phone in our classroom. We didn’t talk to parents. There wasn’t any kind of like technology happening at all. So it just symbolizes a lot of change that’s happened in education over the past 25 years.