Giving back work

I spent almost two hours at Just Java tonight, meeting students from both classes who wanted to retrieve their work ... and their grades! As usual, only about twelve or thirteen students came to get their work. That's OK, though, because I'd rather have all those other essays out of circulation!

Imagine: Another semester finished!

One student doesn't think it should be finished, though. He didn't let me know about his troubles until AFTER all the finals had been graded and all the grades were posted -- a visit to grandparents in Mexico, grandmother's death, funeral planning, etc. Now he wants an 'incomplete,' but that's not going to happen. I've written to two people at COD to let them know, just in case he complains. We'll see.

On to Texas on Wednesday.

Afternoon class

Amazingly enough, I managed to get through the afternoon class's papers today and posted their grades at the college's website, too. Interesting mix: 2 A's, 7 B's, 12 C's, and 4 F's. Two of those F's were for students who had stopped attending class two or three months ago, but didn't bother to drop the class; I always find it strange that students manage to forget to do that.

Quite a semester -- with more success in this class than the one on campus, for a change. Very interesting.

Morning class

The morning class's grades are finished and posted on the college's website -- 3 A's, 7 B's, 4 C's, 5 D's, and 5 F's. Not a bell curve, for sure, but then I'm not aiming for that!

Now to finish the afternoon class's finals and grades.

Onward ...

Final essays

I'm in the middle of reading and grading final essays. Almost everyone managed to turn the work in -- not like last semester when several decided not to turn in the final! What idiots!! They all ended up with D's or F's.

So far I've read only about half of those turned in by the morning class, but the good ones are superb and the others are as expected -- a few which reflect almost nothing learned during the semester, and others which reflect having learned how to organize and develop content, but still need MUCH work on the mechanics.

It'll be interesting to see if the final grades change much as a result of these papers.

The best intentions ... !

Well, all my good intentions to use this as a vehicle for keeping track of one semester's actions in teaching English 1A (freshman composition) went bloo-ey! Between the sale of the house, the accreditation at Mountain Empire, moving, and grading tons of essays and quizzes, etc., I just didn't keep up with this.

My classes are down to 25 and 24 now, but there are two of the 25 who haven't shown up in weeks. So in reality, the classes are ending up with 23 and 24 -- better than past semesters, barely! But "better" is better than worse!!

I'm generally pleased with nearly all students' abilities to generate and develop a topic now -- a vast improvement over their abilities in this realm in February! There are still a few who have incredible problems in plain, old, ordinary standard English -- verb uses, plurals not possessives, word choice (especially prepositions) -- but overall, nearly all have come a long way. I can't claim full credit since I know that I can teach until I'm blue, but if a student doesn't work on learning what is taught, nothing happens for that student. This has been a more successful semester overall, I think.

We'll see how the final papers come out!