Say What?! Wednesday

Guess what? It's Wednesday and I'm writing Say What?! for the week! You know how this is possible? Because my grad work is D-O-N-E, DONE! I do have some papers to grade, but who cares about those.. :]

So this is a good story. It makes me so happy that I have only two days left of work.

This week I got an email from a student through our online grading system. Boy, are those things a blessing and a curse! Information is great, but sometimes its way too much. Kids having online access to their grades is nice because you can hold them accountable for knowing what their grade is. At the same time, it means they can nag and harass you about every little thing they see or don't see on there. A great example is an email I got this week. One young man had a D average as of my last update. There have been a number of other assignments turned in since that point, I've just been a wee bit swamped trying to get my grad work done while still planning lessons and working all day and completing an additional 20 hours per week of internship. So this child takes it upon himself to email me about the fact that I haven't posted the new assignments yet. Here's what he had to say:

Dear ms beck please start grading and if you already have graded then u need to post our assignments on engrade my grade has stayed the same on engrade since the interms came out and when ever we ask you you say look on engrade well I'm looking and it's not up to date I don't mean to be rude but my mom still thinks I have a D and I can't prove to her if I do or don't because you won't update so please either update or tell is our grades when we ask thank you.

Nice, right? So Mrs. Beck, if you graded papers faster then I wouldn't have a D. Riiiiiiight. My response included the advice not to earn a D in the first place if he didn't want his mom to see that he had a D.

So today while I was -- whatta ya know -- grading papers, I was going through an assignment for which students were asked to evaluate President Truman's two options for ending the war with Japan and then share their opinions on which was the better choice. One kid began by talking about what a tough choice "Harriet Truman" had to make.

Ahhhhh, children :]

So, want to hear an update???

Well, we went to see the midwife again yesterday and she said I was still 1-2 cm dilated, so there was no real change from last week. I found this a tiny bit discouraging since I was of course hoping for some more progress. I do feel like I'm progressing in other ways though. I've felt more Braxton-Hicks contractions in the past few days, and have felt a little crampy. Not really sure what that means, but I hope it means she's getting ready for the big day. My next appointment is on Tuesday of next week and I'm crossing my fingers that we don't make it that long!

In the work arena I've got my substitute back in my classroom ready to take over at any moment. I'm only teaching through Friday even if I decide to go back in next week so I don't have to use my leave if we don't have a baby by then. I'm pretty much ready to hand things over. I've got about all of the outstanding papers graded, and I even showed her the grading system today. I made sure to warn her of all the joy she'll get from the children and parents having constant access to your gradebook. I also managed to erase an entire class and all of their grades while doing this. It was a lovely adventure. I was unable to recover everything, but did manage to find everyone's current averages with the blessing of the "back" button. Best part about it though? I'm too close to the end to care :]

Well I think I'll take advantage of the fact that all of my homework is done and go to bed early! I was going to grade some more papers, but I've just made the decision instead to celebrate my last night of class and treat myself to some extra "sleep" (or whatever it can be called these days). Just keep your fingers crossed that the next post is announcing Carsen's arrival!