The Time Has Come

I didn't grade last weekend. Saturday was a big event at school and I was there most of the day, and Sunday I didn't feel well and stayed home from church. I don't do schoolwork on Sundays anyway. Other than that brief break, I've been grading papers madly every evening for a while now, with occasional bursts of whining about it here on my blog. Every day I give back papers, usually with only a day or two of turnaround time if it's a draft that needs feedback, though the final pieces I've been putting at the bottom of the pile. Every day I hear, "FINALLY!" when I give work back. This is not putting me in a good mood, particularly when I have NO OTHER LIFE besides grading these days.

So today was the due date. Nothing after today, this is IT, this is the end.

This afternoon I came home with a HUGE mound of papers. I just counted them, and there are 99. Yes. NINETY-NINE.

(Did I mention I only have 44 students in 7th and 8th grade?)

Many of these papers are the culmination of several drafts, and will not take long to grade. Then there are the others, the ones I'm seeing for the first time, the ones that were written yesterday in a twenty-minute frenzy at the computer. The ones like the paper I conferenced about today, which I would have a hard time summarizing - let's just say it has all the elements of classic 8th grade work, including insults to classmates, space travel, flatulence, and a shootout. (We don't live in the US, so we don't have to escort kids from school in handcuffs if they mention weapons in their writing. And they were aliens that got shot, of course, not the aforementioned classmates.)

Yes, I am postponing the inevitable by blogging. My grades are due on Monday. I have work to do.