I'm Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack :)

Grades were due by noon this past Friday...I stayed up the night before until 2 a.m. grading papers...which has been the normal routine around here for the last 4 weeks. 

Needless to say, after the gradebooks were turned in and my name checked off the list, I crashed...and then crashed some more today....and probably will crash again tomorrow after church.

But, I have soooo missed blogging.

and reading the blogs of others...

and reading PERIOD...

anything other than student essays for a few weeks please.

I love what I do...when I am in my classroom doing my thang, I am in my element.  There are teachers who are easier than me and others who are harder.  If I'm completely honest, I'd probably have to admit that there are more teachers who are easier than harder :/

Sometimes I feel funny about that.

And, I question myself.

But, then I remember that sometimes "hard" means you require work, active learning and student responsibility.  

I know I grade hard...but it's with the safety blanket of not counting off for everything I mark. In order to become a better writer, one must write.

In order to become a better reader, one must read.

It's actually pretty simple.

If a student is willing to do the work and pull his/her own weight, I'm available to help them 24/7. 

Only 2 students failed my class this summer...and both were extreme situations. 

One of the failing students has already re-signed up for my class in the fall.

I don't think the other one will though.

Still, another, an A student, chose her final essay to express her great dis-satisfaction with me personally: somewhere along the way, I obviously said or made some comment she didn't appreciate.  

Oh well.

She probably made some comment along the way that I didn't like either.

Such is the life of a teacher.

However, the rest of the 45 consistently recognized in their final essays that I required much of them and had high expectations for them, but that I only asked them to do as much as I was willing to do with them. And, almost every one of them recognized that they had progressed in some way as a reader and writer over the course of the last 4 weeks.

I can live with that.