A little grading, a whole lot of fiddling

I've been futzing around with things like grade sheets and emailing students who are AWOL--mostly because I can't quite bear to read any more student work but feel as if I should be doing something that has something to do with class.

Regarding grade sheets: this may seem like a ridiculous expenditure of energy, since I'm teaching, and therefore grading, online, but since NCC insists on the need for paper rosters--and those paper rosters have to have a break-down of how the grade was determined--it's helpful for me to have an Excel spreadsheet that will calculate specific categories of grades in ways that Blackboard's Grade Center doesn't seem to like. Or, really, that I don't want to have to figure out.

But in putting together the Excel spreadsheet, I realized I wasn't sure exactly how many sheets I'd actually need. I only need them for the students who have submitted enough work that calculating their grade requires more than adding two or three numbers. And I realize that there are a few students who might still return--at least for a while--though they seem at the moment to be among the missing.

As for the emails I've been sending, I doubt they'll have any particular effect, but I've now done all I intend to do. We haven't yet gotten the Academic Progress thingy that we are required to do every semester; I imagine that in all the upheaval over the pandemic, "suspended" classes, attempts to transition as much as possible to online modalities, and hoarding of toilet paper, that little detail has slipped through the cracks. If it ever happens this semester, it will happen too late to be of any use to much of anyone (especially students whose grades are in danger)--but I will, of course, dutifully fill it out.

And in all this pother, I had rather blissfully forgotten that students are supposed to submit their revised essays by end of day Sunday--which means more substantive grading for me next week. So I really "should" have tried to hang in there a little longer getting discussion board fora graded, but ... nah. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Sunday. There will be time....