I missed a few days of school for the Gulf States Quilting Guild Seminar. But the reality of what happened without me set in immediately. The seminar was a great deal of fun, and I loved meeting other teachers. They were all very gracious and we picked each others’ brains for tips, tricks, and techniques that we can use in our own quilting/teaching journey. Isn’t it wonderful how giving and helpful quilters are?
So that return back to school? Oh, heavens!
I had left work for my students, but that work had to be graded. And grading is not fun. Playing teacher as a child rarely included this aspect of teaching. But it’s real. Oh, very real.
So let’s do a little Mary math here: I have 51 students. Each child was assigned a lesson or two from our Ready Reading workbooks. A lesson may be six to eight pages long. But there were three days, so let’s go with five lessons. That means forty pages to thumb through and grade, (Truthfully only about 15 questions per lesson.) In the end that’s three packets (one per day) of about five lessons times which means 255 lessons or 2040 pages. That’s too many pages to flip so let’s do it this way.:
Each student had five lessons with 15 questions each, so there were 75 questions per student. That comes out to 3,875 questions to check. No wonder it took me a week to grade them.
But wait! There’s more! I wasn’t happy with some of the grades, so I gave those kids a “talking to” and had them correct their answers. That means I had to go through the work a second time. Thankfully the majority was serious about the work and actually tried while the substitute was here.
Regardless, no matter how you math it, returning to school after a teacher break is hard on the teacher. And this teacher learned the biggest lesson.
