December 13, 2011
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1 How come the headlines on Google, AOL, Yahoo!, etc. often don’t match up with those in the Merc News?
2 The web places tend to sensationalize everything. Almost ever other day, for instance, they have a picture of some celebrity chick wearing a “shocking” or a “stunning” dress. Who cares?
3 Or some sports’ millionaire yammers about how upset he is about something.
4 They may have “Five foods that could kill you today.” But rather than listing them, you have to go to their site and watch a bunch of junk TV. Suppose you grab one of those foods right before you watch the junk TV thingy, and keel over. O, the irony.
5 I can’t even hide from the Republican circus. Every other day I read something about Perry being a gay basher, or just anything about some guy whose parents named him “Mitt”. I wouldn’t name my dog “Mitt”.
6 The Merc News, on the other hand, has a front page piece on how the Occupy movement is going to blockade all the ports from Southern Cali all the way up to Anchorage. It will also have news about Intel, and about Brown’s tax hike.
7 Granted, those are West Coast news stories, but they tend not to repeat the same patterns that we see on the Web.
8 Every couple of days AOL throws up a picture of some psycho killer with frizzy hair and a lame brain look on his face. The trouble with that is that it won’t go away for like five days.
9 Or in the upper right-hand corner they’ll have a picture of a drooly old man who turns his head and stares at you. I think they’re trying to sell you on some insurance company or something, but it is borderline scary.
10 Obviously not much going on this Tuesday.
11 And as I have been reporting for the past couple of weeks, no news is always good news.
12 Moving on, Part the First: We’re gathering and preparing for finals this week, and I have been desperately trying to stay WAY ahead of my papers, so that during our Christmas break, which begins Friday afternoon, I’ll not have to spend any time worrying about school.
13 I talked with a teacher friend briefly about this yesterday, and she said that it is ridiculous how much grading we do nowadays.
14 I pointed out that with class sizes increasing three students per class, we now have fifteen to to twenty more students than ever before. That’s a half to two-thirds of another class, and it is also fifteen to twenty more papers to grade each assignment.
15 A lot of teachers haven’t put that together yet. I remember that thirty was as high a class count for an English class that we needed; even thirty-one or thirty-two would make a difference in class noise.
16 When when class sizes increased, so did the noise level, as well as the settle-down factor. It wasn’t much, but it is noticeable. If a teacher has a small classroom with desk shortages, students can now be found sitting on the floor. Don’t get me wrong; some students insist on sitting on the floor anyway.
17 But the largest impact has certainly been on the paper chase. It keeps teachers from seeing family and friends. Outsiders say, “Well, don’t assign as much work.”
18
19 Each six weeks we have to justify a grade. We absolutely need to give at least three and maybe four assignments a week. When you start doing the numbers, it becomes a blizzard of papers, of organizing, and of constantly sitting around grading things in order to meet deadlines.
20 I know one teacher who keeps her papers on her car seat, and grades things at stoplights.
21 So right now, I’m on a mission to knock all of my papers out by Friday. I’ve been on it for weeks now, spent Saturday from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon reading essays.
22 It has been difficult to do anything but grade papers and then conk out. We also have to plan each day, run off materials because our books don’t cover grammar, for example, as well as books we might buy on Amazon. I bought myself a copy of Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition for ten bucks, and it has been a Godsend to my students. But I spend a lot of afternoons in the copy room hoping the machines don’t jam.
23 Believe it or not, I’m not really complaining, just explaining why some of the DN’s have been a tad short lately, or have had cut/paste news. I’m finding I have less and less time to do this.
24 Earlier in the year I would go to sleep at eight or nine and awaken in the middle of the night to do this. Lately, however, I have been sleeping wonderfully through the night, but when I awaken in the morning, I’m finding that I’m beginning to do rush jobs, which is no fun, because the DN is fun to write each day.
25 I’ve also often said that I don’t really write this drivel. It’s always like automatic writing, which is why I find myself chuckling at things like pictures of questioning dogs, or monster posters, and people screaming in terror.
26 So I’ve got to keep today’s DN a little short.
27 But I have made huge inroads on the paper chase. I gave group work this past week, and canceled a vocabulary lesson. The papers didn’t come in, and instead of a hundred-fifty times three assignments, I’m collecting only six papers per class. The math suddenly leans a bit more in my favor.
28 I’m generating almost no paperwork while having time to pound down the huge workload I have right now.
29 But I’m up against the wall this morning trying to get the DN out AND to make it to school on time!
30 So sorry about the grousing; it wasn’t really grousing, it was excuse-making.
31 Anyway, call it what you will, I have to put this baby to bed.
32 See you tomorrow. Drive safely; there’s black ice and freezing temps out there, or so I’ve been told.
33 Catch you on the reebz.
34 Peace.
~H~
