Confession: Bailout

One of my biggest weaknesses this first quarter has been creating a logical, organized system of assignments and grades.  Its understandable considering that I've never done it before, but my whole system has just sucked ... seriously.

In the beginning, I just collected everything.  Everything was treated as if it was life or death.  This stemmed from my own sense of inadequacy in both asking students to do anything and in my lack of confidence of why we were doing it.  As a result, I've got piles of papers, much of which has been thrown away, some of which gets filtered through to help boost student scores by giving them more chances to score on stuff.

It gets worse.  I've been horrible at keeping track exactly what was to be handed in when.  Some classes handed in assignments that I simply forgot to ask other classes to hand in.  Sometimes I would forget until the bell pretty much to remind about handing stuff in.  I almost feel bad for my students, it must be confusing and frustrating to keep track of everything.  Not entirely, there are at least 15 students that keep good track of everything to be handed in and do so beautifully.  However, knowing myself, I would have really struggled in my class so far.

As a result, I've decided to implement a "mercy-based" grading policy this first quarter by extending deadlines on almost all assignments for all students.  This week I've had students flocking around my desk at the whiff of possible make-up work.  I've had students that were failing hand in 6-8 assignments and suddenly shoot up to a C-.  I've also had students that have a 16% do nothing and not show up for anything.  She makes me really mad.

I don't plan on doing this next semester.  I'm actually really glad for a new grading period.  Its kind of like a fresh start.  I'll be doing things differently this time - clearly documenting all assignments due online and when - so students have to go find out for themselves.  Also, I need to do better at getting students feedback several times a week.  But to do that requires time to grade, and thus far most of my time goes to planning.  Hopefully I can do better this next quarter.  In the meantime, I'll just give my students a big nasty bailout so that I don't have to defend my horrific grading malfeasance.