I have four piles of final exams on my dining room table. I had hoped by assembling them into neat stacks and by making some excellent checklists, the papers would just go and grade themselves. Sadly, not.
Ian and I spent the day together. I picked him up at 11:15 from his morning school. We came home for bologna and American cheese sandwiches. He watched a video he had picked up from the library, I Love Toy Trains, Number 10 and 11. It’s two full hours of footage of model trains. The video was so boring that it actually drove me to grade half a stack of papers. Then, speech therapy. We had a couple of hours before Jonah came back, so we called up his buddy, Ryan, for a playdate.
Ryan and Ian are always dragged along to their older brothers’ sports events, so they see each other a lot. Ryan is cool with the fact that Ian doesn’t talk much. They spent two hours playing with water and mud and trucks. Ryan’s mom and I sat on the back steps talking about kitchen remodeling and summer camp. Every once in a while, we hollered, “get that water hose away from us, boys.” Nice day.
Apt. 11d 
I just finished two straight days of grading papers by students who wouldn’t recognize a sentence fragment it they tripped over it. Ugh.
My advisor once told a class I was in that his method of grading papers was to carry them all to the top of the stairs in his house, and one by one toss them into the air. He would then grade them in accordance to how far they traveled before hitting the floor: A papers would be the ones that made to the end of the hall, F papers were the ones that didn’t even make halfway down the stairs, etc. He came up with some nonsense explanation about the weight of the papers, etc. I continue to use the same story today. It’s remarkable how many students apparently believe me.
LikeLike
That sounds like a pretty good day even with having to deal with the grading!
LikeLike