The Day I Stopped Bringing Papers Home to Grade

One of my least favorite teacher tasks is grading papers. I try to get all my school work done at school (I have a one-year old and four-year old, so not much school work gets accomplished at home). Since I gave a short Polynomials Quiz to round out the week, I decided to bring the quizzes home to grade. Of course they sat in my school bag all weekend without ever being touched - I totally forgot they were even there. Monday morning, I'm unpacking my bag and I pull out an empty water bottle.

It's 7 am on a Monday morning, so my brain is not firing at 100% and I'm trying to remember if I put an empty water bottle in my bag. The bag didn't even feel wet. That's because I had 140 quizzes in my bag to soak it up!

I wanted to throw the whole soggy mess right into the trash can, but instead I put it down and went about teaching my first two classes. Luckily I had "pl-unch" on that Monday {planning and lunch together ;)} so with a two-hour break, I decided to lay the quizzes out to dry. They covered almost every surface in my room.

I decided to open the window to speed up the process and the wind caught it and blew it right off the hinge. So I also got to make an embarrassing phone call to the front office and basically tell them I am an idiot.

Then I walked around with my marker and started grading. Almost every paper had a least one dry corner where I could write the score and look how cool the papers look when you write on them wet. One student asked if I graded them with watercolor paints and another asked if I was so upset with the quiz grades that I threw them in the lake. #thingsteenagerssay.

Someone with a badge that said, "glazer" later showed up to fix my window, and give me a mini-lecture about not opening windows during wind advisories, which I totally deserved after he had to stand on a ladder next to my open second story window and screw a hinge back together.

Morale of the story - Stop bring papers home to grade!! :)