…and use the names of characters from your favorite TV show to distinguish between four different versions of a take-home quiz:

(If I add a fifth version next year, I’ll probably use the name “Ms. Moreau”…)

This is what a stack of 150+ seven page exams looks like.1

After the students have fled, I’ll put on my coffeehouse jazz playlist on my iPod2 and dig in.3 While grading papers can sometimes be oddly therapeutic, I’d rather not do any more than absolutely necessary.

I grade these things page-by-page, so as to maintain some consistency in how I grant partial credit between classes. I also usually start grading from the last page of each exam — because the latter half of each test contains the open-ended free response questions that take wayyy long to grade — and move my way to the front of each exam — which house the much quicker multiple choice questions.4

I’d estimate that it takes about three solid hours to work through 3 classes worth,5 so I try to start while the next class period is taking the exam. I’ve learned the hard way: every minute that you can be efficient with counts.

This is test #9 of the year,6 and for the first time this campaign, after grading a particularly painful free-response question7 question one hundred fifty-some times, I thought to myself,

Thank God I don’t EVER have to grade this question again…8

Only four more lessons until the start of the “postseason”. Time has wings, indeed…

1. Writing that reminds me of the line early in Jerry Maguire, where Tom Cruise narrates the kid baseball player hitting a deep ball with: “Check out what pure looks like.” Well… this would be the opposite. I can also picture a student reading this, thinking, “Maybe you should just give us shorter exams!” :p [↩]
2. silver 80GB Classic… vintage by today’s standards. [↩]
3. If you’re curious, “The Prestige” is playing in the background.” [↩]
4. If you’re reading this thinking, “You give multiple choice questions!? How easy!!!” then I have a couple of hundred statistics students ready to throw daggers in your general direction. [↩]
5. so one A-day or B-day’s worth [↩]
6. and only one more to go! [↩]
7. the one about the DC Schools cheating scandal from a few years back [↩]
8. well, until next year. [↩]

During my usual pre-exam spiel today:

Me: No notes, no cellphones, no internet… no FaceTime-ing your friends across the room during the test…
Kid: Can we use an Apple Watch?
Me: Mmmm… if you get the gold one, I’ll think about it.

They laughed.1

They knew I was joking.

…

…

…

I hope they knew I was joking…

1. In case you hadn’t heard, them things are kinda expensive. [↩]

This time of the year, we’ve all got it. Everybody — teachers, principals, and especially students — are running — really, more like limping and dragging ourselves across the floor, gagging — on the fumes of our fumes. The needle is decidedly tilted towards “surviving” and less on “thriving”.1

Every campaign has a “I’ve hit the wall and I just need to curl up and disappear and eat hamburgers and ice cream and sleep forever” moment in it somewhere. Generally, we forget about these moments because in the end, things always work out well. Occasionally, though, it helps to remember that we’ve survived those crapstorms in the past and that calmer waters are almost always just around the corner, beyond our immediate periphery.

This past week or so — which by the way has had way more riding on it2 than any week ought to — was one of those moments.

Last week in class, I had a student ask me how I cope with stress. After thinking for a brief few seconds, it hit me: “Duh. I eat.”

Not going to lie: I eat my feelings.3 Great for the soul, not so much for my bathroom scale this time every year.

One of our students made hats for the two Statistics teachers on our campus:

I pointed out that my “q-hat” signifies the probability of failure. My afternoon students quipped, “Well when you look in the mirror, you see success. But when other people look at you they see failure.” Zing!!!

And in one of those great “you had to be there” moments: This past week when I was teaching 2-sample means, I often have to say “mu two” — which sounds like “mewtwo”. This usually incites giggles.4

During one of my first classes, I noticed a lack of any childish giggling when I said “mu two”5 and openly asked:

I almost find it odd that no one is giggling whenever I say ‘mu two’… Are kids your age no longer into Pokemon?

A student sitting near my perch responded with a no-nonsense, matter-of-factly:

What do you think we are, nerds?!

After about seven seconds of honest awkward silence, the same kid reaches into his backpack to pull out a Pokemon water bottle, which he slams on his desk with a straight face, then proceeded with his note taking like nothing happened.6

:)

1. Vice Verses. Track seven. But backwards. [↩]
2. between AP exam registrations and my first formal observation at my new campus [↩]
3. Honestly, I gotta think that a lot of teachers do. I actually had a student this morning tell me that I should pursue a career as a traveling foodie blogger! Actually… that sounds incredibly gleeful. [↩]
4. I don’t really know much about Pokemon, but after five years of teaching this, I know that it’s a Pokemon thing. [↩]
5. Really, sometimes it has gotten so bad that I would purposely say “mu one and mu second” or “mu A and mu B”… [↩]
6. nbd [↩]