grading

Snow Day

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There’s a big Nor’easter sweeping up the coast. We’re forecast to get up to 14 inches of snow by tomorrow night.

3093efb9ef16c682c5aeceb5d269a4caAs a winter baby (February birthday), I’ve always loved snow. I have no problem being up north all year long.

As a teacher and a mom, I especially love snow days. Like today.

xmas-lights-ge-lights-swscan01680-copyI might actually get caught up with some of the extra work of the season (like trimming the tree that has been cut and put up in the living room for two days now without anything on it).

I might get to tackle the 8 loads of laundry or the 10 inch stack of papers.

My list is far longer than I can accomplish in one day (especially with everyone home and needing to eat…and I’m the chief cook and bottle washer), but it’s a gift nonetheless. Hope you’re all enjoying your day, wherever you are.

Do you have snow days (or a hot weather equivalent) in your neck of the woods?

I Am Cinderella Take 2

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imageI’m at it again tonight…and last night, and tomorrow night, and the night after that. Cinderella once more, likely up until at least midnight all these nights, trying to get caught up with paper work.

Spread over my dining room table is my stack of research papers. There are 50 of them. It’s important, necessary work for students…a process they need for college, to write the papers their professors will require, for presentations their careers may demand,  and even life in general, when they need to know how to ferret out meaningful information from the piles of dreck on the inter-webs, read it, understand it, and use it in meaningful ways.

But it’s exhausting to assess and grade.image It takes me at least 20 – 25 minutes per paper, because I have to check what’s written against the sources used, to ensure it’s used properly and well, without plagiarizing etc. And it’s not the only paperwork I need to accomplish before quarter averages can be tabulated.

I think I’ve figured out how I get so behind, so that each five week period I end up having to sink at least five nights of 6 – 8 hours of grading into my personal life, after work hours. I’m usually just too drained when I get home from my 8 hour school day working with 92 teenagers to manage a grading session once supper is made and cleaned up, laundry is thrown in, a child’s sporting event is attended, and one-on-one parent/child time is eeked out, among other things.

This Cinderella is getting too old.

Love my students (really, really do). Love teaching and feel incredibly enthusiastic about facilitating their insights, inquiries, and learning.

Can’t hack the paperwork anymore.

Such is life, though, until I retire in another seven years or so.

For right now it’s my lot to turn into a pumpkin on a regular basis. 🙂 I have the will, but now I just need the energy and the time…

Happy Sunday, all. Catch you on the upswing tomorrow when I’m more properly caffeinated.!

I Am Cinderella…

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papers-to-grade

An actual stack of student papers that is the work of only three of my six classes…

The Struggle is Real…but I have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat!

In this modern age (so different from when I began teaching, back in 1988), student grades are submitted electronically, via computer. That means when grades are due on a particular date, they can be submitted up until midnight…at which point the system will lock you out, preventing any further entries.

In my case, the academic year’s first set of five week “progress report” grades were due today (well, technically yesterday at this point).

I am a HS English teacher.

With 92 students per day.

I bring home a LOT of papers, quizzes, reading logs and daily writing journals to read, correct, write suggestions on, and assess, followed by tabulating and entering averages into the computer, along with the variety of helpful comments that are expected and selected by code (i.e. typing in “300” will print out “A pleasure to have in class” on the report that students receive at home).

I am always behind in my paperwork (as in “I can either have clean clothes/see my kids/make dinner for the family/do the dishes/plan lessons/attend one of their sporting events/sleep for seven hours straight once in a while…or whittle away at the ever-growing pile of papers). Add my own fiction (or blog) writing to the mix, which is necessary for my mental health…and well, you get the idea.

It’s a never-ending battle, and a balancing act that tires me more than seven straight hours a day interacting with/facilitating discussions of/serving as sounding board and mediator for masses of young (sometimes hormonal) people ages 14 – 18. Don’t get me wrong: I love my job and adore my students – really and truly. A few get squirrely now and then, but mostly they are great. I feel privileged to work with them…but I HATE the paperwork.

Tonight, at the stroke of midnight, I entered in the last grade.  I escaped the wrath of the Guidance Office, who would be calling me in consternation tomorrow morning if they opened the system to run grades and some of mine were missing.

I am Cinderella, and I made it out by the time the clock struck 12. 🙂

Goodnight, all…