time management

So. When the school year first started, it took me about 3 hours to grade my classes' journals each week. See, I ask my kids to write at the beginning of each class for the first 5 minutes or so, and I give them a prompt of some sort, usually related to what we're reading in class. Their task for the week is to fill one side of one sheet of notebook paper. Not too much really (though some of my students seem to have difficulty with the concept of filling the page and leave an awful lot of blank space, then wonder why they don't get full credit) for them to do.

I've discovered a way to make this grading process go faster. I've stopped actually reading them. I can still make the comments that make it *look* like I'm reading it, because I pick a line or two here or there to read, and comment on that. They don't know that I don't read the rest. Mostly, I read the entries where I've specifically asked their opinion on something we've done in class. It strokes my ego nicely to read them telling me how much they enjoyed my project. Of course, then I sometimes get entries like this:

"Well, I haven't done the project yet, but I really like it! It's more fun than writing a paper. I'll try to turn it in next week!"

How can you like a project you haven't actually done, I wonder? Oh well. Never seek logic in a high school student's thoughts.


Of course, never seek logic from your local central office team either. I got to go to a district department meeting (essentially), where they were giving us cutting edge information to use in our classroom! Not. What were they teaching the room full of experienced English teachers about?

Vocabulary.

I particularly loved the part where they told us the exact same thing they told us at these meetings last year. Wait, that was the whole meeting.

On the plus side, since there was nothing of any actual merit being presented, I got some work done on my NaNoWriMo novel. In case you're wondering why I've gone silent this month, it's because I've been busy knocking out a 50000 word novel over at www.nanowrimo.org . Because I don't have enough to do, I need to give myself crazy writing deadlines. I'm learning well from my students, I think...