New Years Resolution

I'd be fooling myself if I tried to make a resolution saying I wouldn't procrastinate on my grading in 2009. I *should* make that resolution, since after not doing any work all break until yesterday, I spent 3 hours grading journals and quizzes yesterday, and I've spent three hours today grading classwork and late work. And I still have a stack of poetry explication from my Juniors and a set of essays from my seniors. The essays, at least, shouldn't take too long, since only about 2/3 of the class bothered to turn in an essay. Zeroes are easy to enter into the grade book.

It's been a while since I took the time to write in here, so I'll just offer up a few highlights that I can remember of things that I've learned from my students in the last half dozen weeks.

1. I had my students write a modernized version of "The Devil and Tom Walker" and let them re-title it if they so desired. One of them gave me a story titled "Satin and John Walker." That smooth, silky cloth will get you into trouble one day...

2. I have a student with 30+ missing assignments for the second 9 weeks. He wanted to wait until he had everything together to turn it into me, and gave it to me the Friday before break. He told me he spent hours making up all his work. Those 30 assignments somehow turned into about 6 worksheets and a packet, 1/2 of witch are from the first 9 weeks so they don't count for anything. Total change in his grade = about 5% points...which means he's still failing by a lot. Sweet kid...a little shy on the common sense.

3. I made an exception for a student whose mother came in to meet with me. I told her she could email me the outline that was due, and instead of getting it in before break, I just needed it before Christmas. Spent about 20 minutes with them after school, explaining exactly what was needed. Four days after Christmas, I get a call from the kid's tutor asking if all I was looking for in their draft was an outline or if I wanted an actual draft in addition to the outline (that I still haven't seen). It's a good thing my boyfriend was in the car with me when I received this phone call, or I might have just driven myself into a tree. Not that this kid would understand what that meant. Might be more effective to drive into her house, but a: I don't know where that is, and b: she's so dense I'd probably just bounce off of her anyway.

Anyway, back to grading, where I get to read "short paragraphs" about poems, which for most seem to be about 1 sentence long...