Whew. I am so much better today than I was yesterday. Let me explain my week...
Monday: Summer school started. I was pleasantly suprised with 9 students total. Out of three classes.
Tuesday: Summer school day two. I gained 5 students. Yay. So I have 14 students. Two are in both my first and second period because they failed both fall and spring semester. But I still have only 14 students. And since I have so few, they're going to do fine (I hope) AND they will now be reading a novel. I never told them that summer school was going to be all easy.
Tuesday night: I flew to Dallas for a three-day professional development for pre-AP teachers. (one of my co-teachers had my kids for the three days.) Luckily my roommate for the development is a middle school English teacher that I had some HISD classes with last year. We got along swimmingly.
Wednesday: 8am. The pd (professional development) began. There's this fantastic organization called AP strategies, and they have a sub-section called Laying the Foundation for pre-AP and LOTS of districts in Texas participate. We attend seminars, participate in professional development trainings, etc. and at the end of the year our students take an end-of-course exam. They read a nonfiction passage and had to write an essay on the rhetorical devices that the author used to support her purpose (and they had to figure out the purpose of the speech... and it's NOT to inform, entertain, or make the reading easier). This week was for a chosen number (maybe 500) of us to come to Dallas to score the essays from that exam - all 50,000 of them. So most of Wednesday was for training purposes - how to score the essays. We saw some great ones, we saw some terrible ones. In the late afternoon we began scoring the "live" essays. I began a paper clip chain to keep track of how many folders I completed (25 essays per folder). I finished a folder and a half. The first day was fun - I was learning a lot and was happy to see that my students weren't as behind as I thought - the majority of the essays were either 2s or 3s on a 6-point scale). I figured out some new essay instruction approach and I saw some really fantastic writing.
Thursday: 8-5 was ALL essay scoring (with maybe an hour or two of refresher training). One of the women at my table brought bags of Hershey kisses, and another woman brought other chocolate to the tables, so we were all on a major sugar high by the end of the afternoon (plus they fed us VERY well). I think I finished maybe 9 paper clips that day. My table was fun - every time we read a crazy essay we shared it and kept our spirits up (many kids knew that this test didn't count so they wrote other stuff besides the actual essay). But even with the fun, my head was pounding by the end. I began to be grateful for the blank essays or the essays that were off-topic and entertaining or the essays that were only one or two paragraphs. I was tired of seeing poor writing like "she used metaphors to compare stuff" or "the writer used imagery to support her purpose" (and then not explaining what the purpose was) and I was a mental mess by 5pm. I wanted to just go up to my hotel room and lay on the bed in a daze.
Friday: Day three. We scored from 8-12:30. I finished a grand total of 13 paper clips. I was grumpy, dizzy, frustrated by the end. I spent over an hour on the last folder - I kept losing my concentration and had to read some of the essays two or three times. I was sick and tired of the crappy essays. Let me tell you, good essays were far and few in between. After lunch we had a closing session in which the question leader from each age group (grades 8-10 were represented; I was in the 10th grade room) presented the passage the students had to read, the essay the kids had to write (did I mention it was a timed essay and they had 40 minutes to read, plan and write the essay?) and the best essay from each age group. I am proud to say that I was the pirate that found the buried treasure of the 10th grade essays. And it was the only 6 I saw. Again, I saw mostly twos and threes. And the occasional essay in which the student was cursing the assignment or asking for a "break" because that student had a rough week (seriously). And then there was the one in which I decided the writer was high on drugs and the one in which the student wrote that he wasn't going to conform and bow down to the educational ******* who waste their time writing essays to bring students down and enforce even more restrictions upon them. He ended his quite lengthy rant with "f*** this essay and f*** society." Yeah, we flagged that essay. He probably wears trench coats to school.
And then last night I was at the airport for WAY too long. The hotel shuttle dropped us off at 3:30, so some friends and I wandered around until 5, which is when we made our way to the terminal so that we could get good seats (first come, first serve at Southwest). After sitting on the floor, an employee said that our 6pm flight was now delayed until 7pm. Groan. 10 minutes later, the same employee said that our flight was now delayed until 7:40pm. Double groan. I spent the next two+ hours chatting with the guy next to me, so time went by quickly. By the time the plane got to the airport and we were allowed to board, it was 8pm. Some of the other Houston flights were also delayed, so our flight was brimming with people trying to get to Houston ASAP. When we finally landed at Hobby, it was 9pm. I went down to baggage claim to get my bag and ran into teachers that took an earlier flight. Their bags were on my plane so they had to wait at Hobby. But when I walked away from them, I happened to look at the pile of luggage that arrived earlier. There's my suitcase. So I was delayed but my luggage was not. I don't understand. I assumed that the luggage went on the plane that I was on.
But now I'm home, catching up on reading BOOKS, and trying to brace myself for the reading of 14 essays tomorrow (my students' work).
Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment