Words of Wisdom

Youth is wasted on the young.

Wednesday 26 November 2008

Marking Reports Marking Reports More Marking...

Well now I have officially blown NaBloPoMo. I skipped a day.

To tell the truth it hasn't been going as well as I'd hoped. There seems to be so much else going on and so little time to construct well thought out posts like so many of the bloggers I admire. I guess I will just have to face the fact that I am not a well thought out person anymore, if I ever was.

Yesterday we had the last of the History oral presentations on Vietnam. The marking criteria had pointed out that reading huge slabs of notes off Powerpoint presentation did not constitute an 'oral' so most of them ditched Powerpoint and read huge slabs of notes off cue cards instead. They did not seem to see the problem with this.

"But Miss....they were on CUE cards!!!!!"

One fellow produced a speech suspiciously similar to that of a girl we'd heard the day before. Hello, I thought to my clever self. It sounds like they have downloaded this directly off the same website, but no. He had merely pinched her cue cards out of her locker.

Zero for that then.

At least he was honest when challenged. Well, he could hardly lie. The cue cards were constructed of pale pink paper beautifully mounted onto flowery card.

Right, off to write more perceptive and meaningful report comments which start with

'X is a delightful, enthusiastic pupil.....'

move onto

'however, X would benefit from.....'

and finish with

'I wish X every success for Year 11.'

Last time, my scintillating vocabulary had them all lining up to see me after the holidays.

"Miss, what does flippant mean? You wrote it on my report."
"Penchant.....what did you mean I have a penchant for loud humour...?"

Hell. Look at the time. These things are due at 9am.

Byeeeeeeeeeeeee

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps giving them a pocket dictionary with their reports would be good!
Elisa

A Free Man said...

When I had to do a similar thing at Oxford I could never remember my students names so I just wrote the same thing for everyone. Maybe that wouldn't work so well for you...

Gawlerites said...

I used to write the answers very small on my pencils and the inside of my white shirt cuffs and wait for the teacher to go to sleep then I would become a young genius. This even worked to get me to the NASA launch pad

Anonymous said...

A freeman ended up looking up all his students on facebook...
Haha your students asking you what flippant and penchant means... I would be making them reports even more esoteric this term, and add loads of cool words!

Arizaphale said...

AFM: You looked up their names on FACEBOOK???? That takes the proverbial cake!

SSG: I think I was all out of cool words at 1.30am this morning!!!

Gawlerites: You are just scary ITT! remind me to ask you about NASA at the Bestie's Christmas party.....