Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of you who are wondering why teachers don’t correct all of the mistakes and provide detailed feedback, I wonder if you have ever graded a set of papers? Each paper takes the grader a significant amount of time to do what is basically copyediting, and then on top of that, you have to engage the student’s ideas and provide feedback about their logic, structure, argument building, use of supporting/relevant detail from the text, or whatever else the assignment is meant to do. Writing fulsome comments along those lines takes forever as well. So if you expect copyediting and deep, detailed comments about the substance of a paper, and you multiply that by 30 kids per class, you are talking about an infinite number of hours to grade one assignment. On top of that, teachers have to plan classes, grade other kinds of work like in-class quizzes or student presentations or whatever, and then do the rest of their job. That’s after teaching in the classroom for most of the day. It just takes too much time. What would help is if teachers in other disciplines where students submit papers, like social studies or whatever, would also focus on the actual writing and not just the substance. And it would help if students review their papers and at least run them through spellcheck and grammar check.

All of that might take up a lot of time, but it isn’t teaching kids a damn thing about writing.

So it all would seem to be a waste.

Private school teacher here. I’ve spent about 5 hours today (on Labor Day, ironically) commenting on my students’ first essays of the year. Each is taking me about 25 minutes, and I have 60 of them. I’ll get these back by Weds, at which point my students will review my comments and complete a reflection. They will then have the opportunity to revise for a higher grade, taking into account my written comments and their own reflections. We will then begin essay #2.

Are you telling me I’m wasting my time providing all of this feedback? I would have loved the opportunity to go to the pool with my family today.

Back to reading essays, and wasting time apparently…

I was addressing the poster who said she doesn’t have time to give feedback.

Reread. She never wrote that she doesn’t provide feedback. She was simply explaining how much time it takes and how little time she has.

I’m that poster. I left teaching in part because there are too many students who don’t care about learning to read and write well. So spending hours of my life giving feedback to students who don’t care was getting demoralizing. And you can’t just identify the ones that might care and only give feedback to those students. This is all on top of the endless bureaucratic nonsense.

I work in a completely different field now and have endless sympathy for my former colleagues. I always tell my children that if they want to become teachers, they should definitely not become English teachers because of the absolutely crushing workload.

My sympathies, Labor Day paper grader. I see you!

No one was criticizing Labor Day paper grader. She made that up herself.

I also question where she teaches because all the private schools I’m aware of in MD don’t start until after Labor Day. Which school would have started early enough for kids to have already turned in essays?

Good Counsel, Georgetown Prep, etc.

They’ve been in school for one week. The most you’d be talking about is short response papers to initial readings.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The masses these days are poor. It's been nearly 10 yrs since the majority of public school students live in poverty.

IMO, schools should teach the basics to mastery. Until then, your kid shouldn't move on.

Most don’t live in poverty.

Yes they do.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/02/16/maryland-child-poverty-wes-moore/#

Anonymous wrote:My friends who are high school English teachers and college writing professors have been talking for several years now about the complete decline of basic writing ability they are seeing in students. They say it is abysmal.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The masses these days are poor. It's been nearly 10 yrs since the majority of public school students live in poverty.

IMO, schools should teach the basics to mastery. Until then, your kid shouldn't move on.

Most don’t live in poverty.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents refuse to raise their own kids.

Newsflash: it isn’t up to parents to provide 100% of the kid’s education.

Public schools teach the basics to the masses. You need private for more than that.

--MCPS teacher

And that’s acceptable?

in ms and hs teachers teach 5-6 classes with at least 30 students each. Some teachers go above and beyond but mist do the absolute minimum.

MS and HS are too late to lay the foundation for academic skills. Mcps doesn’t equip students for success due to their wacky approach k through 5.

Anonymous wrote:Why is the PP @$$clown arguing with the teacher who is grading papers. Even if , for argument’s sake, the teacher is a fake poster, it’s a side tangent. How does it move the bigger conversation along?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of you who are wondering why teachers don’t correct all of the mistakes and provide detailed feedback, I wonder if you have ever graded a set of papers? Each paper takes the grader a significant amount of time to do what is basically copyediting, and then on top of that, you have to engage the student’s ideas and provide feedback about their logic, structure, argument building, use of supporting/relevant detail from the text, or whatever else the assignment is meant to do. Writing fulsome comments along those lines takes forever as well. So if you expect copyediting and deep, detailed comments about the substance of a paper, and you multiply that by 30 kids per class, you are talking about an infinite number of hours to grade one assignment. On top of that, teachers have to plan classes, grade other kinds of work like in-class quizzes or student presentations or whatever, and then do the rest of their job. That’s after teaching in the classroom for most of the day. It just takes too much time. What would help is if teachers in other disciplines where students submit papers, like social studies or whatever, would also focus on the actual writing and not just the substance. And it would help if students review their papers and at least run them through spellcheck and grammar check.

All of that might take up a lot of time, but it isn’t teaching kids a damn thing about writing.

So it all would seem to be a waste.

Private school teacher here. I’ve spent about 5 hours today (on Labor Day, ironically) commenting on my students’ first essays of the year. Each is taking me about 25 minutes, and I have 60 of them. I’ll get these back by Weds, at which point my students will review my comments and complete a reflection. They will then have the opportunity to revise for a higher grade, taking into account my written comments and their own reflections. We will then begin essay #2.

Are you telling me I’m wasting my time providing all of this feedback? I would have loved the opportunity to go to the pool with my family today.

Back to reading essays, and wasting time apparently…

I was addressing the poster who said she doesn’t have time to give feedback.

Reread. She never wrote that she doesn’t provide feedback. She was simply explaining how much time it takes and how little time she has.

I’m that poster. I left teaching in part because there are too many students who don’t care about learning to read and write well. So spending hours of my life giving feedback to students who don’t care was getting demoralizing. And you can’t just identify the ones that might care and only give feedback to those students. This is all on top of the endless bureaucratic nonsense.

I work in a completely different field now and have endless sympathy for my former colleagues. I always tell my children that if they want to become teachers, they should definitely not become English teachers because of the absolutely crushing workload.

My sympathies, Labor Day paper grader. I see you!

No one was criticizing Labor Day paper grader. She made that up herself.

I also question where she teaches because all the private schools I’m aware of in MD don’t start until after Labor Day. Which school would have started early enough for kids to have already turned in essays?

Really? Can you tell my principal that? All the teachers and students showed up on 8/23 for the first day of school. We would have loved to know we had an extra week of summer! Wow, the joke is certainly on us!

Yes, my students wrote a diagnostic essay the first week of class. I can’t help them grow as writers if I don’t know where they currently stand.

You can try to one-up me. It isn’t going to work, but you are welcome to try.

You started school on a Friday?

8/26… a Monday

You said 8/23. Also, people don’t call them the principal in private schools. It’s the head of school.

I’m skeptical of you.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of you who are wondering why teachers don’t correct all of the mistakes and provide detailed feedback, I wonder if you have ever graded a set of papers? Each paper takes the grader a significant amount of time to do what is basically copyediting, and then on top of that, you have to engage the student’s ideas and provide feedback about their logic, structure, argument building, use of supporting/relevant detail from the text, or whatever else the assignment is meant to do. Writing fulsome comments along those lines takes forever as well. So if you expect copyediting and deep, detailed comments about the substance of a paper, and you multiply that by 30 kids per class, you are talking about an infinite number of hours to grade one assignment. On top of that, teachers have to plan classes, grade other kinds of work like in-class quizzes or student presentations or whatever, and then do the rest of their job. That’s after teaching in the classroom for most of the day. It just takes too much time. What would help is if teachers in other disciplines where students submit papers, like social studies or whatever, would also focus on the actual writing and not just the substance. And it would help if students review their papers and at least run them through spellcheck and grammar check.

All of that might take up a lot of time, but it isn’t teaching kids a damn thing about writing.

So it all would seem to be a waste.

Private school teacher here. I’ve spent about 5 hours today (on Labor Day, ironically) commenting on my students’ first essays of the year. Each is taking me about 25 minutes, and I have 60 of them. I’ll get these back by Weds, at which point my students will review my comments and complete a reflection. They will then have the opportunity to revise for a higher grade, taking into account my written comments and their own reflections. We will then begin essay #2.

Are you telling me I’m wasting my time providing all of this feedback? I would have loved the opportunity to go to the pool with my family today.

Back to reading essays, and wasting time apparently…

I was addressing the poster who said she doesn’t have time to give feedback.

Reread. She never wrote that she doesn’t provide feedback. She was simply explaining how much time it takes and how little time she has.

I’m that poster. I left teaching in part because there are too many students who don’t care about learning to read and write well. So spending hours of my life giving feedback to students who don’t care was getting demoralizing. And you can’t just identify the ones that might care and only give feedback to those students. This is all on top of the endless bureaucratic nonsense.

I work in a completely different field now and have endless sympathy for my former colleagues. I always tell my children that if they want to become teachers, they should definitely not become English teachers because of the absolutely crushing workload.

My sympathies, Labor Day paper grader. I see you!

No one was criticizing Labor Day paper grader. She made that up herself.

I also question where she teaches because all the private schools I’m aware of in MD don’t start until after Labor Day. Which school would have started early enough for kids to have already turned in essays?

Really? Can you tell my principal that? All the teachers and students showed up on 8/23 for the first day of school. We would have loved to know we had an extra week of summer! Wow, the joke is certainly on us!

Yes, my students wrote a diagnostic essay the first week of class. I can’t help them grow as writers if I don’t know where they currently stand.

You can try to one-up me. It isn’t going to work, but you are welcome to try.

You started school on a Friday?

8/26… a Monday

ETA: orientation was 8/23

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of you who are wondering why teachers don’t correct all of the mistakes and provide detailed feedback, I wonder if you have ever graded a set of papers? Each paper takes the grader a significant amount of time to do what is basically copyediting, and then on top of that, you have to engage the student’s ideas and provide feedback about their logic, structure, argument building, use of supporting/relevant detail from the text, or whatever else the assignment is meant to do. Writing fulsome comments along those lines takes forever as well. So if you expect copyediting and deep, detailed comments about the substance of a paper, and you multiply that by 30 kids per class, you are talking about an infinite number of hours to grade one assignment. On top of that, teachers have to plan classes, grade other kinds of work like in-class quizzes or student presentations or whatever, and then do the rest of their job. That’s after teaching in the classroom for most of the day. It just takes too much time. What would help is if teachers in other disciplines where students submit papers, like social studies or whatever, would also focus on the actual writing and not just the substance. And it would help if students review their papers and at least run them through spellcheck and grammar check.

All of that might take up a lot of time, but it isn’t teaching kids a damn thing about writing.

So it all would seem to be a waste.

Private school teacher here. I’ve spent about 5 hours today (on Labor Day, ironically) commenting on my students’ first essays of the year. Each is taking me about 25 minutes, and I have 60 of them. I’ll get these back by Weds, at which point my students will review my comments and complete a reflection. They will then have the opportunity to revise for a higher grade, taking into account my written comments and their own reflections. We will then begin essay #2.

Are you telling me I’m wasting my time providing all of this feedback? I would have loved the opportunity to go to the pool with my family today.

Back to reading essays, and wasting time apparently…

I was addressing the poster who said she doesn’t have time to give feedback.

Reread. She never wrote that she doesn’t provide feedback. She was simply explaining how much time it takes and how little time she has.

I’m that poster. I left teaching in part because there are too many students who don’t care about learning to read and write well. So spending hours of my life giving feedback to students who don’t care was getting demoralizing. And you can’t just identify the ones that might care and only give feedback to those students. This is all on top of the endless bureaucratic nonsense.

I work in a completely different field now and have endless sympathy for my former colleagues. I always tell my children that if they want to become teachers, they should definitely not become English teachers because of the absolutely crushing workload.

My sympathies, Labor Day paper grader. I see you!

No one was criticizing Labor Day paper grader. She made that up herself.

I also question where she teaches because all the private schools I’m aware of in MD don’t start until after Labor Day. Which school would have started early enough for kids to have already turned in essays?

Really? Can you tell my principal that? All the teachers and students showed up on 8/23 for the first day of school. We would have loved to know we had an extra week of summer! Wow, the joke is certainly on us!

Yes, my students wrote a diagnostic essay the first week of class. I can’t help them grow as writers if I don’t know where they currently stand.

You can try to one-up me. It isn’t going to work, but you are welcome to try.

You started school on a Friday?

8/26… a Monday

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of you who are wondering why teachers don’t correct all of the mistakes and provide detailed feedback, I wonder if you have ever graded a set of papers? Each paper takes the grader a significant amount of time to do what is basically copyediting, and then on top of that, you have to engage the student’s ideas and provide feedback about their logic, structure, argument building, use of supporting/relevant detail from the text, or whatever else the assignment is meant to do. Writing fulsome comments along those lines takes forever as well. So if you expect copyediting and deep, detailed comments about the substance of a paper, and you multiply that by 30 kids per class, you are talking about an infinite number of hours to grade one assignment. On top of that, teachers have to plan classes, grade other kinds of work like in-class quizzes or student presentations or whatever, and then do the rest of their job. That’s after teaching in the classroom for most of the day. It just takes too much time. What would help is if teachers in other disciplines where students submit papers, like social studies or whatever, would also focus on the actual writing and not just the substance. And it would help if students review their papers and at least run them through spellcheck and grammar check.

All of that might take up a lot of time, but it isn’t teaching kids a damn thing about writing.

So it all would seem to be a waste.

Private school teacher here. I’ve spent about 5 hours today (on Labor Day, ironically) commenting on my students’ first essays of the year. Each is taking me about 25 minutes, and I have 60 of them. I’ll get these back by Weds, at which point my students will review my comments and complete a reflection. They will then have the opportunity to revise for a higher grade, taking into account my written comments and their own reflections. We will then begin essay #2.

Are you telling me I’m wasting my time providing all of this feedback? I would have loved the opportunity to go to the pool with my family today.

Back to reading essays, and wasting time apparently…

I was addressing the poster who said she doesn’t have time to give feedback.

Reread. She never wrote that she doesn’t provide feedback. She was simply explaining how much time it takes and how little time she has.

I’m that poster. I left teaching in part because there are too many students who don’t care about learning to read and write well. So spending hours of my life giving feedback to students who don’t care was getting demoralizing. And you can’t just identify the ones that might care and only give feedback to those students. This is all on top of the endless bureaucratic nonsense.

I work in a completely different field now and have endless sympathy for my former colleagues. I always tell my children that if they want to become teachers, they should definitely not become English teachers because of the absolutely crushing workload.

My sympathies, Labor Day paper grader. I see you!

No one was criticizing Labor Day paper grader. She made that up herself.

I also question where she teaches because all the private schools I’m aware of in MD don’t start until after Labor Day. Which school would have started early enough for kids to have already turned in essays?

Really? Can you tell my principal that? All the teachers and students showed up on 8/23 for the first day of school. We would have loved to know we had an extra week of summer! Wow, the joke is certainly on us!

Yes, my students wrote a diagnostic essay the first week of class. I can’t help them grow as writers if I don’t know where they currently stand.

You can try to one-up me. It isn’t going to work, but you are welcome to try.

You started school on a Friday?

8/26… a Monday

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of you who are wondering why teachers don’t correct all of the mistakes and provide detailed feedback, I wonder if you have ever graded a set of papers? Each paper takes the grader a significant amount of time to do what is basically copyediting, and then on top of that, you have to engage the student’s ideas and provide feedback about their logic, structure, argument building, use of supporting/relevant detail from the text, or whatever else the assignment is meant to do. Writing fulsome comments along those lines takes forever as well. So if you expect copyediting and deep, detailed comments about the substance of a paper, and you multiply that by 30 kids per class, you are talking about an infinite number of hours to grade one assignment. On top of that, teachers have to plan classes, grade other kinds of work like in-class quizzes or student presentations or whatever, and then do the rest of their job. That’s after teaching in the classroom for most of the day. It just takes too much time. What would help is if teachers in other disciplines where students submit papers, like social studies or whatever, would also focus on the actual writing and not just the substance. And it would help if students review their papers and at least run them through spellcheck and grammar check.

All of that might take up a lot of time, but it isn’t teaching kids a damn thing about writing.

So it all would seem to be a waste.

Private school teacher here. I’ve spent about 5 hours today (on Labor Day, ironically) commenting on my students’ first essays of the year. Each is taking me about 25 minutes, and I have 60 of them. I’ll get these back by Weds, at which point my students will review my comments and complete a reflection. They will then have the opportunity to revise for a higher grade, taking into account my written comments and their own reflections. We will then begin essay #2.

Are you telling me I’m wasting my time providing all of this feedback? I would have loved the opportunity to go to the pool with my family today.

Back to reading essays, and wasting time apparently…

I was addressing the poster who said she doesn’t have time to give feedback.

Reread. She never wrote that she doesn’t provide feedback. She was simply explaining how much time it takes and how little time she has.

I’m that poster. I left teaching in part because there are too many students who don’t care about learning to read and write well. So spending hours of my life giving feedback to students who don’t care was getting demoralizing. And you can’t just identify the ones that might care and only give feedback to those students. This is all on top of the endless bureaucratic nonsense.

I work in a completely different field now and have endless sympathy for my former colleagues. I always tell my children that if they want to become teachers, they should definitely not become English teachers because of the absolutely crushing workload.

My sympathies, Labor Day paper grader. I see you!

No one was criticizing Labor Day paper grader. She made that up herself.

I also question where she teaches because all the private schools I’m aware of in MD don’t start until after Labor Day. Which school would have started early enough for kids to have already turned in essays?

Really? Can you tell my principal that? All the teachers and students showed up on 8/23 for the first day of school. We would have loved to know we had an extra week of summer! Wow, the joke is certainly on us!

Yes, my students wrote a diagnostic essay the first week of class. I can’t help them grow as writers if I don’t know where they currently stand.

You can try to one-up me. It isn’t going to work, but you are welcome to try.

You started school on a Friday?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of you who are wondering why teachers don’t correct all of the mistakes and provide detailed feedback, I wonder if you have ever graded a set of papers? Each paper takes the grader a significant amount of time to do what is basically copyediting, and then on top of that, you have to engage the student’s ideas and provide feedback about their logic, structure, argument building, use of supporting/relevant detail from the text, or whatever else the assignment is meant to do. Writing fulsome comments along those lines takes forever as well. So if you expect copyediting and deep, detailed comments about the substance of a paper, and you multiply that by 30 kids per class, you are talking about an infinite number of hours to grade one assignment. On top of that, teachers have to plan classes, grade other kinds of work like in-class quizzes or student presentations or whatever, and then do the rest of their job. That’s after teaching in the classroom for most of the day. It just takes too much time. What would help is if teachers in other disciplines where students submit papers, like social studies or whatever, would also focus on the actual writing and not just the substance. And it would help if students review their papers and at least run them through spellcheck and grammar check.

All of that might take up a lot of time, but it isn’t teaching kids a damn thing about writing.

So it all would seem to be a waste.

Private school teacher here. I’ve spent about 5 hours today (on Labor Day, ironically) commenting on my students’ first essays of the year. Each is taking me about 25 minutes, and I have 60 of them. I’ll get these back by Weds, at which point my students will review my comments and complete a reflection. They will then have the opportunity to revise for a higher grade, taking into account my written comments and their own reflections. We will then begin essay #2.

Are you telling me I’m wasting my time providing all of this feedback? I would have loved the opportunity to go to the pool with my family today.

Back to reading essays, and wasting time apparently…

I was addressing the poster who said she doesn’t have time to give feedback.

Reread. She never wrote that she doesn’t provide feedback. She was simply explaining how much time it takes and how little time she has.

I’m that poster. I left teaching in part because there are too many students who don’t care about learning to read and write well. So spending hours of my life giving feedback to students who don’t care was getting demoralizing. And you can’t just identify the ones that might care and only give feedback to those students. This is all on top of the endless bureaucratic nonsense.

I work in a completely different field now and have endless sympathy for my former colleagues. I always tell my children that if they want to become teachers, they should definitely not become English teachers because of the absolutely crushing workload.

My sympathies, Labor Day paper grader. I see you!

No one was criticizing Labor Day paper grader. She made that up herself.

I also question where she teaches because all the private schools I’m aware of in MD don’t start until after Labor Day. Which school would have started early enough for kids to have already turned in essays?

Good Counsel, Georgetown Prep, etc.

They’ve been in school for one week. The most you’d be talking about is short response papers to initial readings.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of you who are wondering why teachers don’t correct all of the mistakes and provide detailed feedback, I wonder if you have ever graded a set of papers? Each paper takes the grader a significant amount of time to do what is basically copyediting, and then on top of that, you have to engage the student’s ideas and provide feedback about their logic, structure, argument building, use of supporting/relevant detail from the text, or whatever else the assignment is meant to do. Writing fulsome comments along those lines takes forever as well. So if you expect copyediting and deep, detailed comments about the substance of a paper, and you multiply that by 30 kids per class, you are talking about an infinite number of hours to grade one assignment. On top of that, teachers have to plan classes, grade other kinds of work like in-class quizzes or student presentations or whatever, and then do the rest of their job. That’s after teaching in the classroom for most of the day. It just takes too much time. What would help is if teachers in other disciplines where students submit papers, like social studies or whatever, would also focus on the actual writing and not just the substance. And it would help if students review their papers and at least run them through spellcheck and grammar check.

All of that might take up a lot of time, but it isn’t teaching kids a damn thing about writing.

So it all would seem to be a waste.

Private school teacher here. I’ve spent about 5 hours today (on Labor Day, ironically) commenting on my students’ first essays of the year. Each is taking me about 25 minutes, and I have 60 of them. I’ll get these back by Weds, at which point my students will review my comments and complete a reflection. They will then have the opportunity to revise for a higher grade, taking into account my written comments and their own reflections. We will then begin essay #2.

Are you telling me I’m wasting my time providing all of this feedback? I would have loved the opportunity to go to the pool with my family today.

Back to reading essays, and wasting time apparently…

I was addressing the poster who said she doesn’t have time to give feedback.

Reread. She never wrote that she doesn’t provide feedback. She was simply explaining how much time it takes and how little time she has.

I’m that poster. I left teaching in part because there are too many students who don’t care about learning to read and write well. So spending hours of my life giving feedback to students who don’t care was getting demoralizing. And you can’t just identify the ones that might care and only give feedback to those students. This is all on top of the endless bureaucratic nonsense.

I work in a completely different field now and have endless sympathy for my former colleagues. I always tell my children that if they want to become teachers, they should definitely not become English teachers because of the absolutely crushing workload.

My sympathies, Labor Day paper grader. I see you!

No one was criticizing Labor Day paper grader. She made that up herself.

I also question where she teaches because all the private schools I’m aware of in MD don’t start until after Labor Day. Which school would have started early enough for kids to have already turned in essays?

Really? Can you tell my principal that? All the teachers and students showed up on 8/23 for the first day of school. We would have loved to know we had an extra week of summer! Wow, the joke is certainly on us!

Yes, my students wrote a diagnostic essay the first week of class. I can’t help them grow as writers if I don’t know where they currently stand.

You can try to one-up me. It isn’t going to work, but you are welcome to try.