Which means that every six weeks I cry and mutter and drag myself through giving grades.
This past year, our district elected to force all of us to put our grading on-line. Which would be fantastic even for the paranoid and ludditic among us, I am sure, if they would just choose a program that had been tested, tried, and basically as bug-free as our current, more individual ways of doing it. Fundamentally speaking, a program that worked. Is that so much to ask? I am sure they made such a brilliant move into the not-quite-competent future to increase everyone's ability to see a student's progress-- the student, their parent/guardian, teachers, etc. Only a cynic would suggest this was done primarily to allow administrators to put their noses in my grade book whenever they want without ever actually setting foot in my classroom. (I get a nice little alert every time they peek. Sweet.)
So this grading term, I had to say good-bye to my tried and true grading program/system, refined over the last ten years, and say hello to a small form of purgatory known as the almost-working district system. Fortunately, I am a wary enough sort that before entering grades into the program, I recorded every single one of them on paper. Like... old system + new system = two systems full of time.
Having passed through our first grading period in this Brave New World, I, like Prince's advisors, have renamed this ritual. Formerly known as Grades, they shall now be known as Grrrrrrrrrr.
Why?
Because our grades were to be submitted through the program by 3pm on Friday.
On Thursday, at 8pm, I sat in bed, lap top as an electric blanket, inputting the last of the marks into the system that would hopefully add them up correctly and spit out a grade for the period in question.
I saved every three minutes or so because the program makes a habit of "de-recording" scores during certain times (though when those times will be is decidedly less certain). Around 11pm, I start getting pop-up messages alerting me to save my work, since the program is fixing to shut down momentarily for a "fifteen minute" upgrade. Highly convenient, that. This pop-up message came onto my screen approximately every ten seconds, resulting in a complete inability to save anything. Slightly even less convenient.
So I logged off. Took 20 minutes and one shower off. Tried to log on.
Error message.
Took another 30 minutes off. Tried to log on to the following message:
Dear Program Member:
The Program is currently performing scheduled maintenance on your school's web site. Account logins and certain other activities are
unavailable during this period. Today's maintenance (9 Aug 2009) is
scheduled through 4:00pm PDT, but may complete sooner. Please check
back.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this upgrade.
Thanks.
The Program Team
So let me just recap here. 1. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrs are due at 3pm on Friday. 2. The system will be down until 4pm on Friday.
That is just awesome.
And so I did what all responsible teachers would do. I wrote one nasty venting note to my Assistant Principal and went to sleep. 1:30am.
Later (5am) Friday morning I got up, tried to log on to nothing, sent snarky text messages to some dear ones, and figured I should go to work to 1. get chewed out for not getting grrrrrrrs in on time and 2. do the grrrrrrrrs the way I had previously done them, which of course would take me at least seven hours, since I had to re-add up and then bubble everything. Oh and 3. teach classes.
All of this reasoning left me standing at 6am in front of this MUNI bus stop sign:
And I admit it. It was not my finest hour. I was inspired to raise a finger in toast and yell the following at this particular campaign:
Fuck you. Our bell doesn't currently fucking ring until 3:35pm. So fuck you, nimrods.
Ahem. Adjust tie. Smooth down hair. Board bus. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
No comments:
Post a Comment