Grading (Friday, 2010 October 8)
I have approximately four and a half classes worth of papers left to go through. I am not enjoying it. This was just the warm-up; next week is the real test for the sequence, which means each paper will be four times as long.
Today is a bad day. I’m not sure if it is related to grading papers or not. I am feeling demotivated. I think part of the problem is that when my 4e class (for example) does well, that makes me think they cheated, whereas when my 3e class does not do well, that makes me think they tried to cheat, but none of them actually could have been bothered to learn the material. I need to take a much firmer grip on classroom conversation next time, but it’s hard because I know it’s impossible to read my handwriting and I can’t write on the board and also penalize students at the same time.
I also gave a horrible lesson to my terminales. The saving grace is that I finished with this stupid "history of informatique" crap with them.
I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that I am not a good teacher and that I do not really have a desire to become a good teacher. I think I said this during model school too, though. This weekend I just want to spend 12-24 hours being a nerd and playing with cool software, or even mediocre software (at this point I’m not picky). But instead I have to come up with approximately 100 questions, possibly more if I want to be decent and not re-use tests for my three classes of 4e or my two classes of 3e, and grade papers approximately as fast as the students create them. Ugh.