I wrote the following on January 12th... and then I forgot about it. Sorry I didn't post it earlier
Yesterday was a tough day for me. I still had to come into work although none of the students came. It was an in-service preparation day because we have just finished term 2. I was comforted by the thought that I could come to school in sweats, but I was horrified by the fact that I had to drive in a Utah blizzard to get there.
Freak-out #1: So, leaving my house around 7:05, I began the perilous trek. There was so much snow on ground, snow on the roads, snow still falling from the sky, snow everywhere. The snow plows had yet to come clear the streets. I drove so slowly, yet I still could feel my car sliding from time to time. The freeway was especially scary since cars around me expected me to go faster than I was actually willing. The scariest moment of the whole thing was when I tapped my breaks while on the freeway and my car freaked out on me. I lost control and spun around a full 360 degrees before coming to a stop in the middle of the freeway. IT WAS SOOO SCARY! Luckily, there weren't any cars around me, and I spent the rest of the car ride to the school thanking Heavenly Father for protecting me. ....and then I got stuck in the snow right in front of the school parking lot. A few helpful souls helped push me out, but I didn't appreciate their judging scoffs at my not-made-for-snow car. Well, to end the morning, I finally parked my car, got inside the school, and burst into tears. :( What a stressful morning.
Freak-out #2: End of term means grades go out. Grades going out means that I look at a multitude of Ds and think, "What am I doing wrong!?" (I swear I had this exact same experience at the end of 1st term. Will I ever learn?). I had one class that had 13 Ds (I'm not even exaggerating here). It is hard to balance grades so that they reflect what students have truly learned and not just what they have or have not turned in. For example, most of these Ds were the cause of missing Articles of the Week and monthly Reading Logs. So, with tears gathering in my eyes, I rushed to a neighboring teacher to ask for advice. The tears did come as I told her of my predicament and asked her for advice. She suggested that I lower the worth of those assignments so that they not monopolize my grades so much. Instead of having a Reading Log be worth 50 points, she suggested that I lower it to 25 and see what that did to my grades. Her argument was that the students who turned in the Reading Log on time and got 50 out of 50 in the first place were probably already A students and the extra credit they would receive from getting 50 out of 25 points now wouldn't change the high grades very much. Well, I tried it out....AND IT WORKED! Yay! So, what did I learn? I learned that you need to make sure the points you assign your assignments balance each other out. A reading log should not be an unseemly amount of points compared to assignments you do in class where you see your students learning in the moment. It is a hard concept to actually put in practice, but at least that is one more freak-out that I can put behind me.
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