Schinckel.net

I’m feeling pretty down today. Which really annoys me, because I have a Touch Football tournament on this weekend, and I’d love to be able to really focus on that, and prepare. At least I will have plenty of motivation to go hard, though.

See, my Year 12 IT Studies kids are supposed to be handing in work, or have handed it in already. I have to submit my results to SSABSA tomorrow, and at this stage I don’t have anything that even slightly resembles a full marks book.

I have found this to be the worst aspect of teaching. Trying to get all of the required work from a cohort of students.

It makes me feel like a bad teacher. Why can’t I manage to get all of the students, or even a majority of them, to submit all of the required tasks? Am I doing something wrong? I know there are stacks of things I would approach from a different direction if I were teaching the subject again, or if I could do it over. But surely I m not single-handedly responsible for their lack of work.

Having had discussions with other teachers at my school makes me think not. One of the Maths teachers mentioned she had 3 out of 17 students who have submitted all of their tasks. A Science teacher had similar things to say of his class.

At some stage, students need to stand up and take responsibility for their own actions. Regardless of excuses they make (the computer network is down, or whatever), I have continually reminded my class of the tasks they have not completed. And yet with some students, I have received no more than 20% of their assessable work. And these are the very same students who have not attended at all in the “extra week” I have put on for them, since I was absent all of last week.

Perhaps I just need to go “fuck it”, and hand out a whole bunch of failing grades.

Of course, that would only result in me getting hauled through the admin team’s offices, wanting to know why so many students scored so badly. So I spend countless hours giving students way more help than I would really like, and quite a few of my website projects look fairly similar.

Stiff shit. I’m over this whole thing. I am just killing days until the year finishes.