Well, that went much better

I did take time this morning to go to my yoga class--a necessary mood stabilizer and body refresher--and I ran two quick errands, but I was working before 1:30, and I did exactly and precisely what I set out to do. I graded the essays I'd allotted to today's "nut," and every third essay I took a break for a little walk around the block (or several). I grant, my life was made much easier by the fact that two students hadn't finished their essays, so I had almost nothing to say to them. Well, one didn't finish; the other submitted four pages--of which about 3/4 page was actually sentences constructed by him. The rest was quotation. It was properly cited, but massive reams of quoting. I actually went through the essay and pulled out the sentences he'd written so he could see how paltry his contributions to his own paper were.

I confess that, in the first batch I graded, I slipped back into old habits and spent longer than I should have on each one, but I pulled myself back from the brink after that walk (and after realizing how long the first three had taken me). I'm hoping that I do a better job of being expeditious in my evaluations on all the essays, from first to last. I have no idea what to expect in terms of quality, but the essays I graded today weren't bad. The sentence skills were about what I'd expect (I don't expect much any more, but these at least made sense) and the students generally had something to say that made something approaching sense.

As for tomorrow, it will be interesting to see what happens with one student. He came in to see me in the second week, I think, as he was worried about his grades--but since then, he's missed a lot of class (either completely missed or just come pretty late); he hasn't been turning in work, and his essay still has not been submitted. That's not entirely his fault: there was a glitch with Turnitin, so a number of students were having difficulty--and he did send me the screen shot of the "upload" page, showing that he at least had gotten that far. So I sent him an email in which I said he should email the essay to me and I'd upload it. I spoke to the SUNY help desk, and I sent the information I got from them to the entire class, explaining how to trouble-shoot if the problem arises again. He said he'd contacted Turnitin directly, and they said the technical problem should be fixed within 48 hours. I told him again to email his essay right away as I don't want to wait 48 hours for it. He wrote back to say he would "try his best," but he was at work and couldn't get to the essay, which was on his home computer. Today? No email. No upload. Not quite sure what I want to do about that, but I did warn him that I might reschedule his appointment if he didn't get the essay to me. If it's not there when I start grading tomorrow, I will at least do that--but I need to let him know that he's rapidly sabotaging his chances for success.

Ah well.

I did check to see if any of the students who hadn't submitted on time might have submitted today; nope. So far, that's five essays I don't have to worry about, not counting the student in the anecdote above.

So, that's a good day done, I reckon. I'll have to print out more copies of the mechanics checklist tomorrow, but I did get at least the Monday conference appointments logged into the Writing Center software, so that's another little bit of underbrush cleared away. I can now turn my brain off for the remainder of the evening--and it's not too late. Hooray.