So — I ended up spending ten hours grading essays today. Not five. Ten. I worked from 10:00 am until 10:00 pm, taking a total of two hours of break time. I spent those “break periods” straightening up my bedroom and eating lunch and dinner.

Sunday is definitely not a day of rest. I wish I’d understood the meaning of “I will grade your essays this weekend” back in the day when I was a young high school whippersnapper.

Why on earth did I spend so much time on this task? (Here I am, borrowing a writing technique from some of my students: Write down a question and then answer it.) Well, I wanted my students to have plenty of concrete, specific statements from me because, for the most part, they have not yet processed how to apply a couple of general comments to an entire body of work. (I suppose such a lack of processing is in part my own fault.) Perhaps ironically, many of my concrete, specific comments simply identified places where the students’ own writing would have benefited from greater concreteness and specificity. Sigh.

I figure that if I put in the time to write such detailed comments now, I won’t have to do so later in the year: you know, that whole “gradual release of responsibility” concept. I’m crossing my fingers.

Annnd I’m going to go to sleep now, once again putting off my formal planning for a unit that has already commenced. I am also putting off grading a quiz, creating a tracking poster for Accelerated Reader points, etc.

Oh! I created my writing tracker today and entered my first round of data in it. This task feels like a major accomplishment, thus compelling me to record its completion in Blogdom.