Our Town is one of the most widely assigned plays in American high schools, which means a single unit can produce well over a hundred essays that all need thoughtful responses. The play is short and accessible, but the writing it prompts is not always easy to grade. Students drift between plot summary, personal reaction, and real analysis, sometimes inside a single paragraph. Sorting that out is where the hours go.

Most teachers who grade slowly are not reading slowly. They are making the same decisions over and over: is this a claim or a summary, is this quotation doing any work, does this paragraph connect back to the thesis. Each essay triggers the same set of judgment calls, and each one gets re-argued from scratch on a Sunday night. Speed comes from settling those calls before the first paper is opened.

Start by deciding what the essay is actually assessing. For an Our Town unit that might be how Wilder uses the Stage Manager to steer audience attention, or how the bare stage supports the play's interest in ordinary life. Once the target is clear, surface-level issues such as a stray comma splice or a clunky transition can safely drop down your priority list.

Next, sort the stack before you grade it. Skim the opening paragraphs and split the essays into rough piles: clear thesis, buried thesis, and no thesis at all. Feedback within each pile tends to repeat, and seeing those patterns up front helps you write comments that match what students actually need.

Build a Scoring Routine You Can Repeat

A repeatable routine matters more than any single shortcut. Pick an order for reading, such as thesis, evidence, analysis, organization, and conventions, and stick to it for every paper. A fixed order cuts down on mental reorienting, and it makes it much less likely that essay 80 gets a harsher read than essay 8.

• Read the thesis and topic sentences first so you can judge the argument before getting pulled into details
• Score every rubric row before writing any comments so your judgment stays separate from your phrasing
• Limit written comments to the two or three changes that would improve the essay most
• Keep a personal bank of comment stems for recurring problems like summary standing in for analysis
• Take a short break after every ten essays so your scoring stays steady from start to finish

Where AI Fits Into the Workflow

AI grading tools can take on the repetitive first pass. A platform like GraideMind can apply your Our Town rubric to each essay, point out where the thesis is unclear or the evidence is thin, and draft comments in your terms. The teacher still makes the final call, but the initial read no longer eats the first half of every evening.

The quality of that first pass depends on the rubric behind it. A row that says "strong analysis" gives an AI, or a colleague, very little to work with, while one that describes what analysis looks like in a paragraph about the Stage Manager gives a clear target. Teachers who spend twenty minutes tightening rubric language often save hours across the whole unit.

Protect the Feedback Students Actually Use

Speed should never come at the expense of the comments that change how a student writes. A short note tied to one revision task usually does more than a long paragraph of general praise. Something like "your claim about the bare stage is strong, now explain how it changes what the audience notices" gives a student a job to do.

Finally, track your time. Note how long a class set takes with your current process, change one thing, and compare on the next unit. A sorted stack, a tighter rubric, or an AI-assisted first pass each shave off a little, and over a school year of writing assignments those savings add up.