...kicking myself

I have been a slacker. Don't say "You're doing the best you can," because it is NOT TRUE. I've pushed back grading things for a month or more. I do most of my lesson planning the morning of the school day, all because I just bum on the internet for the evening before.

Now the end of the year is upon me. I have FAR too much to do, and not enough time to do it. I have barely done any of my teacherly duties on time. When I finish this blog post, I will hop in a taxi and head to a coffee shop with nothing but a stack of 50 papers, a notepad, and my grading book. I will stay there for 5 hours. Then I'll come home, work on writing the study guides for my exam and recuperation exam (more on THAT ridiculousness later), watch the LOST series finale, finish my study guides, THEN plan my lesson for tomorrow. I only have 8 more periods to plan, but after ALL of this, I have 50 6-8 page research papers to grade by Wednesday. Then final drafts of the papers I'm grading today, which I'll receive on Thursday, THEN final drafts of the research papers next week. I also have to check 60-some journals, and by next week Wednesday, I'll have 60-some exams to grade (of course, I also have to write that exam somewhere in all of this mess).

It would be crunch time even if I had stayed on top of things. But I've made things hard on my students. I have not been fair to them. Sure, many of them don't care about school or my class, but there are plenty who have been shortchanged because of my slacking. I can hope I'll do better next year, but this is me we're talking about.