Murphy is an optimist
I seem to have been struck by Murphy's Law disease. Where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong.
Lovely.
The exam was a disaster. We had 11 questions and needed to answer 10 of them. I could probably answer about 2 questions off the top of my head. There were another 3 or 4 that I kind of thought my way through to something resembling an answer.
The rest? Ha!
On my way to the exam, the elevators had broken, so I was waiting around for about 15 minutes for a freaking elevator. Then the gas tank on the shuttle that was supposed to take me to campus sprung a leak, so I had to wait another 10 minutes until a spare bus came by. At least I left early.
The rest of the day didn't go a whole lot better.
I'm just really frustrated and fed up at the moment. I have to do a lot of grading by tomorrow, too, and the essays are not works of art. I thought I was specific about what I wanted, but I guess not. So now I'm trying to do damage control.
All of the running from task to task is just wearing me out.
I'm rambling, so I'm going to come back later.
3 comments:
Again, tests can be frustrating.
Hopefully it will have a curve based on how everyone did. It may be the teach was getting a feel for where his students stand. You'll be ok. Spoken by someone who's failed classes when I needed to and lived to tell about it.
Now here you are grading the papers of others.
I'm not sure if you are teaching English or creative writing or both combined. You mentioned they weren't works of art. Your challenge will be to draw out their best and I bet you'll find a way to do it. Sounds like they can only improve and there's nothing wrong with that. One of my favorite books regarding writing is "If You Want To Write"..by Brenda Ueland. She may have some ideas you can use in expressing what it is you want from your students. Maybe they need to read her book.
Hang in there Carrie and tryyyyy to relax./*******
I gave them the chapter from Anne Lamott's lovely book on writing "Bird by Bird." The chapter's title? "Shitty first drafts." The "not works of art" phrase was a little euphimism for "I just read 6 pages of your writing and have no freaking clue what you're trying to say."
We had a good workshop in class today, though.
The curve in my pathophysiology class in grad school was hilarious. I never got about a 70%, and yet I had one of the highest grades in the class. Several times, the highest score was about a 65%. That's just a bad exam.
Ack, exams are truly awful. I am sorry you think it went badly.
As for the papers... okay, time for the rug-rats to take some responsibility here, I think!! Seriously, your job is not to write the papers for them.. if the instructions are unclear then they need to take responsibility and ASK you about it. Really. Teaching/learning is a mutual-dance, of sorts. No need to take it all on. I have many euphimisms for 'not up to par' papers, and none are as polite as yours!
Take good care.
xxoxox
Z
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