December 15, 2011
-
1 Had an interesting talk with a couple of teachers yesterday.
2 I walked into the hallway of our building, looked at another teacher who had the same two hours of complete quiet due to finals, and I said, "GOD I love finals!"
3 Eventually another teacher came up, looking as though he had just seen the burning bush.
4 The deal about finals is that we finally have time to get things into the gradebook, on company time. Students take finals quite seriously, so it is extremely quiet in the classroom. I had time not only to correct papers, but to keep them organized as well.
5 Of course, the second I finished correcting the last paper for my fifth period class, I looked over to "The Tub" (a huge plastic container I use to collect all this stuff) and it had filled with brand spanking new three-hundred word essays.
6 I wasn't too concerned about those because I told the students I was going to do a "cursory" job on those just to make sure they jumped through their last hoop of the semester. Still, students take finals really seriously, almost as though they are programmed to do so, which they are.
7 The word "FINAL" at the top of the prompt sheet can be quite intimidating and sobering. For whatever reason, larger assignments will never be taken as seriously as "FINAL". It's psychological. This is the time of year when students destroy their brain cells with "all-nighters", which I consider somewhat stupid.
8 An "all-nighter" is a street brag, like going to "Vegas, baby!" A smart student knows how to pace sleeping times, studying times, napping times, re-awakening times, and then going-back-to-sleep times. Doing a literal "all-nighter" will most certainly lead to dead brain cells and a complete lack of concentration on a tough test.
9 I had a nice talk with one of my absolute best students yesterday. She stayed in after school to finish her essay. I told her she could just take it home, but she wanted to compete the task.
10 I wasn't getting out any time soon, as I needed to keep grading, and to organize all the paper I had. So it was a perfect set-up. After around forty-five minutes or so, I glanced over, and saw her erasing vigorously.
11 She had eraser crumbs all over her desk, and kept whisking them on to the floor, a sign that she was taking my final REALLY seriously. She's not a drama queen or anything, just a bit of a perfectionist.
12 My "FINAL" is actually pretty easy. The students simply have to write a 300-word essay on one of eight topics. They get a "plus" if it one of the six or seven most outstanding finals of the day. A "plus" means that their final semester grade will go up a third. This works well for a student with eighty-nine percent, but really doesn't do much for someone who already has an A+, which this girl has.
13 A student could also receive a check, which means they did the job, jumped through the last hoop, and protected their semester grade.
14 Or a student could receive a minus, which means they didn't do the final, and that their semester grade would go down a third. No student EVER opts for a minus. Why would you?
15 A lot of students just choose safely to do a five-paragraph essay. It's a template, and pretty difficult to screw up.
16 That was really all this student had to do, but you would have thought my "FINAL" was eighty percent of her grade.
17 So there we were. It was actually pretty peaceful, and I got truckloads of work done. We both finished almost at the same time. I had all my stuff alphabetized and separated by class. I color-coded paper clips so that each class had its own color. I was able to check and double-check the accuracy of the grades.
18 She finished, wrote a final copy that was neat, and clean as a whistle. She cleaned her desk one more time, and finally took a deep sigh, and gave a slight shrug of the shoulders.
19 I asked which final will be her toughest, and she said, "Probably AP World." I asked why she spent so much time on my "FINAL" when she could safely have knocked off a five-paragraph essay in a half hour.
20 Her response: "I have always worked as hard as I could to get straight A's, even in grammar school. Several of my teachers wrote my parents that I work too hard, and that I over-work. I can't help it; it's just who I am."
21 I chuckled. "Type A," I remarked. She knew exactly what Type A meant. "I'm the same way," I said. "Only I didn't really hit that mark 'til I got up here."
22 I told her how last year, I wanted to out-do every English 1A teacher in the school. Instead of reading the sample books of The Odyssey, for example, I wanted to bring all twenty-four or twenty-five books to the class. That's about thirteen or fourteen more chapters than any other teacher might attempt. It meant that I had to memorize the sequence of events of each "book" so that each day I could tell the story in as short a period of time as was possible. I'm generally a pretty good storyteller.
23 Since The Odyssey has so many predictions in it, quite a Greek thing, I had to tell a series of tales about predictions, and then the fulfillment of those predictions. If you know anything about the Greeks, it's that any time a prophet or oracle predicts something, it's a safe bet that it will come true one-hundred percent of the time.
24 I told her of a time when I was right in the middle of my fifth period class, and right in the middle of telling the story, when my mind went completely blank. I looked everywhere for help: the ceiling, the door, the ears and braces to whom I was telling the story, and I couldn't remember if I was in the predicting part of the story, or the inevitable fulfillment of the prediciton.
25 The students began laughing, because I must have looked like a moron. It just wouldn't come to me. I eventually reined it back in, but I went home completely mortified that day. It ruined my afternoon and evening.
26 That was certainly one of the drawbacks of being a "Type A" personality.
27 She laughed, and totally understood. It was a nice moment in the year, because here was a Type A teacher conversing with a Type A student. It was almost as though we both had the same personality disorder. We talked for a second in the parking lot, and then parted ways. It was a relaxing moment in the lives of two absolute Type A's.
28 I never thought of myself in those terms, and I think I came to realize that not that many people are wired that way. It was somewhat refreshing to see that there are others.
29 So even though we were out at 12:50, I don't think we got out 'til around 3. And I knew that she had to go home and study for World History, one of the toughest classes in the school, and that I had to go home and grade at least one class set of essays.
30 So I read and read and read, made a bit of a dent, and then conked out at around eight.
31 Today I have just one class, and one more class set of papers to finish by tomorrow. Fortunately, it's a morning class, so I should be out of there by 10:30. Today might just be the day that I turn the corner on all these papers.
32 My goal is not to have any papers or schoolwork during the Christmas break, which begins Friday afternoon and runs through New Years.
33 This means at least two more days of Type A behavior, as well as giving a few pluses, a few checks, and no minuses.
34 Sounds like a plan.
35
36 Have a wonderful day.
37 Thanks go out to Trinh Le for the cartoons. They're perfect.
38 Peace.
~H~
The Daily News
