WEEKS 21 & 22 - Finals and New Semester

This post covers 2 weeks of work since I was unable to write my post last weekend. The semester ended on Thursday the 17th, and then the students were off for a 4 day weekend. On Friday the 18th, teachers had to come to school for record-keeping, then we all had Monday off for MLK day.

Even though we had 8 hours set aside to grade and get everything up to date, as you can see with my hours, it took me far longer than 8 hours to complete my grades. That Friday I spent 10.5 hours at the school getting things done, then I went home and graded for another hour at my house. I took Saturday off, then I did 4.5 hours of grading on Sunday and almost 5 hours of grading and preparing on Monday. This is on top of the 2 hours I did during my prep hour Wednesday, and the 1.5 hours my TA (teacher's assistant...a senior named Maya) did for me on Thursday.

I definitely could have made a final that took less time to grade, but then that's the conundrum I faced: do I give the students a smaller, less comprehensive test just so I don't spend all weekend grading, or do I give an assessment that accurately reflects their abilities in all areas of language even though it will take me a long time to grade? I chose the latter, and I am glad that I did because I feel like I have a better picture of what my students are able to do.

This does not mean that teachers who didn't give finals are bad teachers. Many teachers chose to spread their finals out over the course of the week, or broke up the different parts of the exam so that students took many smaller assessments throughout the quarter rather than a very large one at the end. My preference was to give a large assessment at the end of the semester (in addition to some smaller assessments throughout the quarter), partly because I wanted the students to take it seriously, partly because I felt like I needed to fill the 2 hour block (we normally have 1 hour classes), and partly because it was just a natural time to have a test (our last exam was over a month ago).

As a sidenote, this is the first week I have worked roughly 40 hours (even though I was only in the classroom 3 days this past week). There were 3 other weeks that I worked about 30 hours, but those were Thanksgiving week, a week I was sick, and Christmas. Otherwise all of my other weeks have been above 50 hours, with 4 weeks landing above 60.


Week 21:

Sun	1/13/2013	7:30 PM	11:30 PM	4
M	1/14/2013	7:45 AM	5:30 PM	9.75
T	1/15/2013	7:45 AM	6:30 PM	10.75
W	1/16/2013	8:00 AM	6:15 PM	10.25
Th	1/17/2013	8:00 AM	4:00 PM	8
		5:30 PM	6:00 PM	0.5
		8:45 PM	10:45 PM	2
F	1/18/2013	8:00 AM	6:30 PM	10.5
		7:00 PM	8:00 PM	1
Sat	1/19/2013			0
	Total			56.75

Week 22:

Sun	1/20/2013	4:45 PM	6:45 PM	2
		7:45 PM	10:15 PM	2.5
		10:45 PM	11:30 PM	0.75
M	1/21/2013	2:45 PM	4:30 PM	1.75
		5:30 PM	7:30 PM	2
		9:45 PM	10:45 PM	1
T	1/22/2013	7:15 AM	5:15 PM	10
W	1/23/2013	7:45 AM	5:15 PM	9.5
		10:00 PM	10:45 PM	0.75
Th	1/24/2013	10:15 AM	1:15 PM	3
		2:30 PM	4:30 PM	2
F	1/25/2013	8:00 AM	4:00 PM	8
Sat	1/26/2013			0
	Total			43.25