Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

This past week was a bit stressful. The kids had to finish their short stories, which, after 5 weeks of off-and-on work, a little over 2/3rds of the class had drafts ready to type. As you can probably tell, this made life very stressful for me as I had to repeatedly ask students why they didn't have anything to type after several days of inclass work for the rough draft (5 weeks ago now), 2 days of revision two weeks ago, and reminders every day since that they needed to have their drafts ready to be typed. I even told the kids that anyone who brought in their draft for me to look over would get comments and edits the VERY NEXT DAY. I had 6 kids take me up on my offer out of 140 students.

Luckily, the only lab my students are able to use has this fun setup where the computers will delete all of the local files when they are restarted, which happens every evening. The computers are also not properly cloned, so none of them are hooked up to any type of network drive to make things easy to save. So aside from going around to help the kids that didn't have drafts brainstorm ideas for a hopefully passing paper, I spent my afternoons on Thursday and Friday, as well as Friday morning getting every single Microsoft Word file from all 34 computers. At the start of each class I gave all the students clear instructions on where to save the files, and had everyone do this at the start of class to avoid confusion. Apparently, confusion is harder to avoid than an elephant charging you down, because files were saved multiple times, and all over the place. Like a good teacher, I dealt with this and used my tech sense (and recent documents) to pull every file necessary, and even double checked ones that looked suspect. However, I still had 3 students lose their work, which made me feel absolutely horrible. Anywho... the week is done with, and I spent the weekend zoning out to episodes of "Lost" streaming from ABC's website, going to the batting cages, and performing first aid on my friend's badly cut thumb at a party on Friday night. He's ok, but I'm definitely glad I had a first aid kit in my car, since it came in handy.

I leave you all with a video that my mentor teacher told me about. The music is from Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and I have no idea who the girl dancers are. I would say that this is my message that as it gets closer to TAKs, I will be "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" in every aspect of my teaching, but I don't think that's really going to happen. I'm just going to have fun and get these kids as prepared as possible, and work on getting my grades on a routine schedule for this semester.