Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts

Thursday, November 15, 2007

A Break from Grading and Class

Halloween and the past two weekends have blown by. In addition to massive grading, I've been busy with MayMay. For Halloween she was a ladybug; we were harried parents.


We've discovered that MayMay loves jumping in the inflatable things. Unfortunately, she is not much of a jumper yet. She was more often pummeled by the other kids, but she yelled "jump!" the whole time she was in it.


We took a weekend to go to the Manitoba Children's Museum in Winnipeg. MayMay was fascinated with the train. She could play with buttons and levers and sit in the conductor's seat. She played with plastic food in the galley and made us breakfast. She also got to play with water, rocks, sand, pipes, a VW Bug, fun mirrors, slides, etc.

Then we went to the zoo. Yes, it was chilly, but no crowds and the animals were quite active.


MayMay saw this bad boy and yelled, "It's a puma!" Oh, you have to love Go, Diego! Go!

At the hotel, we had access to a kiddie pool, a hot tub, and a giant water slide. I've discovered that I hate dark, loop-dee-loop spaces filled with rushing water. I was certain that the local mounties and paramedics would get to practice their de-fib equipment and skills.

MayMay was not much better with water. We haven't really had an opportunity to have her swim in large bodies of water, so she was nervous but loved it. We bought her a new life jacket for the occasion. She can't balance herself though and keeps flipping over. Now, though, she wants a nightly swim in our hot tub. It's hard to say no and it's kind of nice to get more use out of it.

So this week it's been time to refocus. My accelerated class is nearly over; Wednesday night was workshopping of rough argument/research drafts. In two weeks, they turn in final drafts. The Gateway section of 1101 is just at the drafting stage; today they turned in their research notes. In 1102, the online class is working on their exam and poetry essays, and in 0050, students just wrote their in-class essay and tomorrow we discuss the next essay. There's a lot yet to do!

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Grading...

I haven't posted for a little while. I'm grading! I have 20 ENGL 0050 example paragraphs and workshops to grade, 25 ENGL 1101 process essays and prewrites to grade, blogs in 3 classes to read and grade, and discussion boards for two classes to read and grade. Then there is the prep work to get ready for each class. I'm not complaining! I'm just making sort of a checklist of what I need to get done this week to ensure I return all student work within 2 weeks of when they were submitted to me.