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First entry, 10:55ish (am):
UPDATE, 11:02 AM
This is the student to whom I had to explain the first essay's instructions in French because she was not at all prepared to be taking the first part of Freshman Comp in English (I don't know why she wasn't in the ESL course; maybe she'd already taken it twice, which I think is the limit). Anyway, the improvement is DRAMATIC. Good for her!
Also Canvas is working again, kinda.
My hands hurt from scurrying around the trackpad/keyboard.
Okay, back to it.
UPDATE, 11:32 AM
I think I'm just going to go to Teams next time. Sigh.
UPDATE 12:11 PM
[redacted]
UPDATE 12:17 PM
Same essay. Claim is made that Gen Z knows how to hide digital activity, makes substantial use of digital savvy to navigate around adult/parental/professorial supervision.
Students can't even hide that they never opened the essay instructions. I'm skeptical.
UPDATE 12:37 PM
Coldbrew coffee is such a "fad" I hate to admit I like it ... but I like it.
UPDATE 12:45 PM
I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again:
We, your readers, DO NOT need to know that you believe your thesis statement.
We need to know whether WE should share your conclusion, and why.
UPDATE 1:37 PM
Gonna need some folks to stop traumatizing my students, too. What the heck are y'all doing, anyway??
UPDATE 3:12 PM
Grading briefly derailed by phone call from @Penny, who wanted to discuss writing the bill for an Act of Congress (no, I am not even surprised).
Grading was also briefly interrupted by another Canvas outage, no obvious reason.
The Honors students are doing a fine job on their reflection essays, but I have remembered that I need to go drop off a script for my Rx this afternoon.
UPDATE 3:28 PM
We got a terrifying email asking us to "justify" our assignment to teach courses.
Everything is the worst (or maybe I'm just tired).
Should probably go drop off that Rx before I grade this next round ... OR SHOULD I?!?!?
UPDATE 4:15 PM
I went ahead and graded the last set of reflective essays. Now I am in that awkward stage wherein I know I need to start checking down my list of "daily work" submitted late and determining which submissions qualify for acceptance and which ones were unapproved or plainly past even the late work deadline.
This is more difficult than usual because I updated my late work policy this semester and, honestly, it hasn't been that "workable" in the sense of carefully tracking submissions and applying parameters; it is ALSO difficult because I inherited, mid-semester, a course that had a late work policy I never designed, in which students were habituated to submitting work more or less at random, whenever they felt like it.
It wasn't my course design, so I did my best to jump in and hang on — but it was challenging from the tail end of February on, and it's challenging all over again as I try to sort out what still remains to be graded.
I think I have all of the ESSAY-length assignments recorded, EXCEPT for those submitted by this one particular student who ... uploaded a very obviously corrupted file, which I am by no means going to reopen in browser at home, much less download.
I guess that's my next hurdle of the evening –– should probably go drop off that Rx first.
Wrapping this post here to let the evening grade calculation misery be its own thing (lol?).