1 I sleep so much better when the Giants win.
2 I have enough things swirling around in my life right now, and baseball shouldn’t be causing insomnia.
3 The other night I went to bed early but awakened at like 2 a.m. and then wrote one of these and then tried to get back to sleep. I never did, and worked yesterday despite it. I still had gotten something like six hours of sleep, but to this Old Brown Shoe, six don’t make it anymore.
4 Ah, it’s all good.
5 But I appreciated the Giants coasting to a victory over the always annoying Cardinals.
6 That team has always been annoying. It’s not that I hate them or anything, it’s just that they always seem like a little pest who likes to tag along and shouldn’t be riding with the big boys.
7 And they always seem to want to fight, or to hurt someone. But Matt Holliday said, “I’m not a dirty player.” I guess that ends it, even though the Merc’s Mark Purdy saw it a tad differenty. Here it is, from our star reporter:
“Then up came the fourth hitter in the Cardinal’s batting order, Allen Craig, who hit a grond ball to the shortstop. The ball was flipped to Giants’ second baseman Scutaro. He tagged the bag to force out St. Louis baserunner Matt Hollidy, charging down the path from first base.
“However, as Scutaro unloaded the ball to first base for an attempted (and unsuccessful) double play, Holliday kept coming. He slid into the bag. Then he slid past the bag. Then he slid into the left leg of Scutaro, hooked an elbow around Scutaro’s knee and performed a Hulk Hogan elbow suflex with a reverse mandible claw octopus cloverleaf sleeper hold.
“All right, slight exaggeration…”
8 Bleh. That guy should be torpedoed. It was nice to see his pie-in-the-face error later on a huge hit by Scutaro. Karma baby. Have a slice of humble pie, with whip, big guy.
9 I hope we go into St. Louie and blow them out of the water.
10 I feel like, “Dude. Just go away. Your whole team is annoying, and now they are hurting our guys.”
11 Just sayin’.
12 Nothing like a nice easy victory in October, followed by a travel day.
13 Breathing room.
14 I still loves me some Giants.
15 Moving on, Part the First: Yesterday was my best Monday so far this school year. On Sunday I had discovered about a bazillion mistakes I had made in my grade book.
16 I normally don’t share this with anyone, but teachers make a bazillion mistakes all year in their grade books, because they handle hurricanes of paper each day.
17 In the olden days, we did our grades in pencil, and did a lot of erasing. The idea is to have everything in proper order each time grades are due.
18 So each grading period is a race to keep all that stuff in order. When it goes out of order, it is hell on earth.
19 Hell on Earth.
20 But I digress.
21 This past weekend I had about ten sets of assignments to get done, each taking approximately forty-five minutes. I also had to go up to my Dad’s to visit and help him with his stuff.
22 I packed all my stuff, hopped on a hobbly mule, and made my way up North.
23 When I unpacked my stuff at my Dad’s house, I found that the ten sets of assignments never made it into my saddlebags.
24 What happened is I had alphabetized and stapled each of the stacks of papers and set them aside so that I could throw them into the saddlebags before departure.
25 I also was SO eager to get the students’ essays back to them that those ten stacks of assignments got swept up when I had the students’ hand back graded assignments and they wound up putting the ungraded papers in their folders.
26 So ten ungraded assignments got tossed into folders which stayed at the school over the weekend.
27 It sounds like a lot of paper, but it compared to the essays, ten assignments are like about an inch and a half from bottom to top–hardly noticeable when balanced against the reams of paper that essays can bring.
28 When I got to Dad’s, I opened my saddlebags and saw that I had left those assignments at the school.
29 This isn’t a major drawback, but when the paper chase is in full bloom, one doesn’t want to get backed up a week, because as teachers, we still assign more stuff. Yesterday I handed the students their folders and asked them to take those all out and hand them back in.
30 Bottom line: I had to spend all yesterday organizing those ten stacks from last week while assigning new things yesterday. Just finding stray papers that have gone into the wrong stacks, or trying to figure out the no-names, or papers that the students mislabeled took the entire day. Never mind that I had to teach as well.
31 When I got home everything was organized, alphabetized, and in order. I then had to write emails to students and parents explaining that things were under control.
32 THAT is the challenge of having an open gradebook online.
33 I’m finding other challenges with that as well.
34 Some parents are ridiculously strict with their children’s progress. If they don’t see the teacher’s gradebook, then they see the progress accurately recorded each six weeks when progress reports come out.
35 If the SEE the teacher’s gradebook constantly, then they might punish a kid if the grade hasn’t been posted, but has been posted for their friends.
36 I also put zeros in the second I don’t see a paper, because I alphabetize each class set of papers, and then staple it the moment it comes in.
37 Occasionally mistakes happen; a paper might slide into another class; papers fall to the ground; students forget to put names on papers, or don’t listen when the teacher asks them to turn the papers in.
38 In all those instances, I immediately put a zero in the book, because that usually results in the situation being taken care of immediately. I can remove a zero and leave it blank if the student emails me, so it’s a pretty fast resolution. A blank does nothing to the grade, but a zero lowers the grade. It’s called “incentive.”
39 So I had to act fast yesterday, and stop the bleeding from those assignments being scooped and put into folders ungraded.
40 In one instance, I was a little too late.
41 I overheard a student say to his friend, “Yesterday my mom threw my laptop against the wall, dude.” His mom had written me about his progress, and he hadn’t been turning in all his assignments. The guy had a C, but had shown recent improvement.
42 I felt bad because none of his recent surge registered on my open gradebook, because I didn’t have the work. And THAT is one of the reasons that digital gradebooks might sound good in theory, but in practice they are really just rough drafts to the final grading period grade.
43 Does that make sense? So the parents think they are seeing an accurate grade, which by now they sort of are because all points are accumulative, meaning that a new grading period doesn’t start fresh. By now, the batting averages are starting to show, but in that one student’s case, he was just starting to hit when his mom clearly overreacted, and now he has a laptop that is twisty and broken. I don’t understand that sort of behavior by parents who purportedly care about their kids.
44 I just entered some stuff last night, but I still have stacks to enter into the digital gradebook because of last week. And now I feel rushed, which can cause still more errors.
45 Just another glimpse of teaching, sort of an inside look that I have been sharing since the school year began.
46 That’s a tough sitch, but right now I have this stuff in order and ready to submit.
47 It just takes a ton of time. With old school pencil grading books, nobody sees anything but the finished product each six weeks.
48 A huge part of me wants to go back to that. We all make those mistakes, but as teachers, our ultimate goal each six weeks is to turn out an accurate product. It’s just that now parents and students can look at our gradebook. Well, their own student’s grade, which might not be accurate at all.
49 And still scarier, I stay WAY on top of this stuff, and a lot of teachers don’t, and have no idea what their students’ grades are until right before the six-week deadline, and then they do all nighters, or even take days off to get the job done.
50 So there you have it; the pluses and minuses of digital gradebooks and current- status grades.
51 More to come.
52 Running late; gottago.
53 Peace.
~H~
