Teaching Tuesday: book count

The most tedious end of the year task I have to do is the book count. Every year before we can leave the building, we have to count every single textbook and novel in the English department. This may not sound like that bad of a task, after all, there are ten teachers in my department who are all equally responsible for completing this count. However, as the largest department in the school, not only do we have more textbooks than any other department, but we also have so very many novels.

And not just for the courses we currently teach. Right now, we house about 50 different works of both fiction and nonfiction that are not currently being used in any course. Some of the books have been in the book room (and not used) for at least two decades now. Some of the books have only one class set being stored in there, or half a class set. Some have three or four class sets. These means we have a couple thousand books to count.

It may seem silly to keep books that no one is teaching. In some cases I agree. However, the reason we keep them is that they’ve all been school board approved. If any teacher in the department wants to change out one of the novels they teach, they can easily do it. In addition, if we decide to develop a new course, like we are doing this year by adding 20th Century Literature, teachers have a lot of options to help them build the course.

Still, it means several weeks of counting before the end of the school year. The books are stored in rooms that are hot and the books are stored in cabinets where even I need a step stool to reach (and count) many of them.

Some years we are able to get students to help us with the count. Other years we get stuck doing it entirely on our own. In theory that means everyone contributes equally, but in reality that is never the way it works. Since I am department chair, it falls on me to make sure it gets down. If anyone doesn’t get their share done, the expectation is that I will do it. And since everyone in my department knows I can’t leave the book count unfinished (both for insurance reasons and because it is one of my duties to make sure it gets turned in), I usually end up doing more than my share.

This year I got started on it early. I had a few wonderful students who offered to help me during their study hall time. I made sure to close off the book rooms a few weeks before the end of school. I knew this would mean that a great many teachers would end up still having books out to their students and books in their classrooms, but the policy is anything in your personal classroom is 100% your responsibility. This year I got smart!

Since my students were working on projects, I collected their books as early as possible as well so that my study hall kids could help me count the books in my room (I store all the AP Lit and AP Lang books in my classroom). Since I have the largest number of books used for my classes, my personal count always takes awhile. But, with some student elbow grease, we got it done in two days.

When I left school on the final day, only two teachers still hadn’t finished their personal book counts, but I let my principal know that two were still finishing up (without throwing them under the bus) and he gave me the green light to leave.

Book count is one of the many things neither college nor student teaching prepared me for. In my four and a half years in the teaching program, I never heard even a whisper of it. While I am not saying my education didn’t prepare me to be a teacher, in many ways it really did, it still never ceases to amaze me all the unspoken duties teachers have.

Teaching Tuesday: Final grading stress

The end of the school year is here. With it comes much cleaning and even more rejoicing. Unfortunately, it also brings in a TON of grading! And not just the run of the mill essays or vocabulary assignments I hadn’t gotten around to yet, but the dreaded F word: FINALS!

It is a requirement at my high school that all students take a final or do a final project that is worth 20% of their overall semester grade. As a rule I give my film lit seniors an essay final. My AP juniors and seniors complete a final project which requires them to create something based on one of the books they read for class, write an essay explaining their project and then give a presentation of the project. While I don’t technically have a final “test” to grade, what I end up with is about 100 essays (and 75 projects) to grade.

This is enough to make my stress level rise a few degrees, but what really kicks it into overdrive is that seniors take their finals on Wed and Thurs so that they can finish up a day before everyone else. This in itself is not a huge issue. However, since graduation is on Friday, all teachers with seniors have to have every single thing, including finals, graded before they leave school on Thursday evening. This means that teachers who give their seniors a final on the last block on Thursday have to stay after school and grade them all right then.

The administration’s argument is that they need to immediately know if a student did not pass and will not be able to participate at graduation. However, it’s not just the seniors in danger of failing whose grades must be done, because they also need to calculate final grades for Valedictorian, Salutatorian and Top 10. Since my AP kids usually make up about 90% of the top 10, I have to get those grades done ASAP.

Thankfully this year both of my senior class finals took place on Wednesday, so I got a bit of “extra” time to get all 60 of them graded. Still, that was 60 essays to grade in 48 hours (while still teaching the entire day on Thursday). I was WORN OUT when I left the building.

On the plus side, that meant that I had until Tuesday at 4pm to get grades for my 40 juniors done. So, I could shove everything of theirs that still needed grading off in order to conquer my senior piles.

As usual, I got it all done. And so far I’ve only had one student email me to ask if there was any way I would bump her grade up 2% so she could get straight A’s this grading period (the answer was no).

Now I plan to take a few days off from anything school related before jumping in to doing lesson plans for the College Board’s summer AP institutes.

I truly wish the myth of teachers getting 8-12 weeks off in the summer was real. My guess is I’ll get a week or two of no actual school work. I’m going to guess maybe a day or two where I have no administrators, counselor or student who emails me with something I have to respond to. So far we’ve been on break for one week and I have yet to have one of those days!

Teaching Tuesday: AP EXAMS!

Yes, that’s right, the AP exams are finally here. The moment I’ve been preparing my students for for the last 34 weeks is quickly approaching. In fact, my first group of students already took their AP Literature and Composition exams last Wednesday. My final group take their AP Language and Composition exams tomorrow.

AP testing time is equally hugely stressful and a great relief to me. As the days of the test near each year, I find myself trying to cram my students with last minute tips and practice activities. I spend their class periods reminding them of what they know and trying to fill in the gaps of what they don’t. I watch as my students stress levels go through the roof and my nervousness for them steadily increases.

However, the day of the test, so much of my stress evaporates. I have given them everything I could and now it really is sort of up to them. There’s nothing else I can do for them. They either got it or they don’t. And this year I feel most of them get it. Or at least I hope they do.

I did have on serious moment of frustration when I watched a kid who had been dropped from my class for failing two grading periods walk into the test. Since he’d been removed from the class well before the test, I didn’t understand why he still took the test. I was irked even more to find out he did not show up for the AP US History test. I’m still not quite sure what the rationale there was. It is a little disappointing to know that his score (which I am sure will be quite low), will drag down my overall success rate.

Tonight though, I get to breath a little easier. My last review is done. All I have to do is get to school a bit early (I always do) to make sure all of my students are at the test and that they all get the motivational packets of quotes and mints I put together for them and then go to my classroom and enjoy 85 minutes of solid grading time, which I really need at this point.

With the conclusion of this AP test, I only have one and a half weeks of school left and if I can just get through grading research papers, I might survive this year!