I am making my really neato on-top-of-everything 2nd period aide read The Hobbit with us so that she can grade the reading quizzes. 🙂 I’m making the test and we are talking about acceptable answers to the questions, but it really streamlines everything if she actually knows the book.

Did I mention that she now updates my gradebook and the school websites for parents to see? I worship this girl. I do check her work, but it takes me about 1/20th of the time to briefly check over that it would take to do the work myself.

Ok, I had a kid plagiarise hard core. The whole first page of his paper is blatantly not his work. I spent a while freaking out because I *hate* dealing with this kind of thing.

I asked the kid to stay in during break and said, “So… what is your favorite work by D.H. Lawrence? Kate Millett?” because he had referenced them in the first page. He said he didn’t know who they were. I asked him where he did his research then and he said, “Oh! Wikipedia! I wanted to make sure I wrote a good background on the literary criticism before I got into this book.” *face palm* I explained to him that large scale quoting of other work is plagiarism and illegal and that he has to fail this assignment. He nodded and just said ok.

I can’t give him a zero. He’s an idiot, but it doesn’t look like he meant to be doing something bad. I’ll give him a 50% and call his mother to explain.

Called mom. She understands and is being very supportive. Yay!

And not even for me. I have had three kids come to me to pour their hearts out and ask for help/advice/wisdom. I’m being as gentle as I am capable and taking them to people with more authority when it is a good thing. It means it has been a day for lots of personal disclosure, “You don’t know what foster care is like!” “Well honey… actually, I do.” “You don’t know what it is like to be the only white kid in a neighborhood and have lots of people want to beat you up.” “Well honey…. actually, I do.” Then there is the kid where his parents have told him he is getting thrown out on his 18th birthday so he is trying to determine his options for getting out of high school early so he can get a job. I understand that situation too. *sigh*

It’s one of those days when I feel like despite how difficult my job is–I am where I am supposed to be. Not many people have had my experiences and I’m glad that I can help the kids.

Disneyland was good. Spending time with my baby is fantabulous. Tired. Busy. The next few weeks are going to be killer. I’m going to beg grading assistance on 4/29. It’s going to be frightning by then. I can do it, but I’m going to barely sleep for the next two weeks. Between grading and planning… I feel like I’m drowning. But! On the bright side, this is the last hard core push for the whole year. 🙂

“In the book of Death of a Salesman by Authir Millar was about a family that lived a typical life. Now with Authur Miller writing this play he wanted to show his point in the book to show how criticism works and the different ethnics. In all the world and years that we the people have been through this was formed to make a point out about how criticism reflects. When you pick up a book and read the first couple of pages you will only buy it if you seem interested in it. The writer wants you to see his/her art of the text. The interesting part of the text is that it’s a game, you have the cards in your hand and the book is the deck. If you play the cards right you can see how the text is written It’s a pick and guess game that would make the book work your mind. If you read over the text you’ll miss all the hints and interpretation of the book. My point is in this, is that in every book has to have text. In ever text there is art formed to explain what the author has benn through or what he/she wants to happen. Everyone has a unique life stye; this could lead to “misreading” or changing how the book is empathized. With everything that is happening in the book, it can effect on how the text is plotted out in the book.”

A real life introduction to a criticism paper for my class. This is by far the worst one I have seen so far. It could get worse. heh (Typos and not ever spelling the author’s name correctly… that’s all her.)

I am finally getting around to grading the big scary criticism essays the kids wrote. (This is the only assignment this year that I have slacked on. The kids are shocked, but actually pretty cool about the fact that I haven’t done it. heh) Each paper is taking about 8 minutes to grade. There are ~100 papers. This means it will take over 13 hours of grading. Holy crudmonkeys Batman. *sigh* I have done 6 papers so far. I started with my cruddy class on purpose (6th period just doesn’t have very many strong students… I don’t know why…) so that things would improve steadily as I go through grading. I have one B-, a couple of C’s and a D so far. Ugh. This is expected, but not cheerful. I’ve been grading for a while this morning. I’m trying to grade 5-10 then take a break, then come back. It doesn’t help that I have massive amounts of house cleaning I want to do and I would much rather be just cleaning. *sigh*

The problem is: I put a lot of comments on each essay. They worked hard on these papers and I belive they deserve to understand what they are doing well and what they are doing poorly. But see, all of my teacher training has told me that a lot of comments are BAD because they freak out the kids and they don’t read them or care anyway. But I still think that they deserve to know how they are doing, Damnit. So I will comment. And I will give them 5 minutes at the end of class to go over the comments and ask questions if they need to.

The last time I did a big hard push on grading I had Erik and Noah help me and we sat around drinking alcohol and making catty comments. That was awesome. 🙂 I wish that these essays could be treated the same way… Maybe we can do that again for the next batch of writers workshop stories. 🙂 Those are less formal and it’s ok for those math/science boys to help grade those ones. I don’t trust them with literary criticism. 😉