Validation through Writing

This week, we had meeting two of Pens to Paper, the student writing group of which I am now advisor. In true CDWP fashion, we began with snacks! The two girls, we’ll call K & E, brought snacks and an agenda that would make any CDWP teacher proud. The agenda started us with a writing prompt: Behind her, the noise escalated…

 Together, with a group of young writers, I put pen to paper (figuratively of course since I was typing) and wrote something of my own creation: a short story of 117 words. I have not written original fiction in over five years and it felt amazing to be sharing the collective experience of creation with a group of ten young writers. This is my creation:

 Behind her, the noise escalated from soft murmurs to the dull roar of stampeding elephants. She’d never been so scared in her life. She was certain they were coming for her and coming fast. Could she ran fast enough? Far enough away to escape? Her legs pounded on the pavement, her blood pounding in her ears as she ran as fast as her body was willing to go. The street was dark, eerily silent, but all she heard was their never ending persistence at her back.

 Suddenly a crack echoed through her mind and a shriek was ripped from her soul.

 She looked back to see if they were gaining on her.

 There was nothing but silence.

Goobric Schmoobric

So as with any technology, some things are good and some are bad and some are simply not as functional as you'd like them to be.


For example the Doctopus script has an additional feature you can activate called Goobric, which is a google rubric. You define what the categories are and how many points it is worth and it will create a fill in rubric that will pop up when you are at a document that requires the goobric you assigned it previously. It's a great in theory but I spent more time grading using goobric than I did when I just used my own excel chart.


The problem with Goobric, and that I wish they would fix, is that you can open the rubric and fill in the grades but if you click out of it to back to the document, you lose whatever you've filled in. I like to grade for one thing at a time and this will not allow you do that. Furthermore, I unclicked the "email grade to student" and it still sent the email to the student. I also discovered that if you have more than one file open, sometimes it assigns the rubric to the wrong assignment so students received grades that weren't even theirs. So that was the end of goobric for me! It was irritating.


I wanted something that would help speed up my grading process, not annoy me whilst doing it. That brings me to my other issue with technology: because they can produce so much more while typing, I find I have way more to read/correct/comment on. It's quicker because I can type comments much faster (and neater) than I could ever write comments, but the volume of grading I have to do is so much more than years past. It's crazy!

one of the best!

So there are probably many times when I've had this thought, but every time it occurs to me, it's like it's the first time: MY JOB ROCKS. I love my job. Today was probably one of the best days I've had this year, I think.


 It was really an ordinary day by all accounts. No student who normally gets 50s suddenly had an epiphany and now is a genius. No student who usually misbehaves finally purchased a halo. But every so often, a class just goes well or you have an interaction with a student that just makes you proud to be an educator. Today, I had a million of those moments.