…is that you need a functioning Stratoliner.
The plane, not the bike. Though a bike would be fun…
Last night I was determined to get through the most difficult of the magazine-writing students’ papers. By this time in a semester, you know who is going to turn in a tangle that will take you a good hour to crawl through. Two of those were sitting on the server, plus two others that will probably be OK. And yea verily, the first one I downloaded filled a half-hour of some mindless drivel on CBS that I turned on to provide background noise to keep me awake, and then it filled all of History Detectives. At 10:00 p.m. when I went to enter the grade, Google Docs would not respond.
Neither would anything else. I was offline. Couldn’t download the second difficult paper, and that left me unable to finish the work I’d laid out to do last night.
{sigh} So, this morning, with whatever was ailing Cox resolved, I still have three more papers to read, one of them something that will take forever to critique.
Honest to god, this is not the way I want to start the day. It’s six o’clock in the morning and I just can’t bring myself to read the thing closely. I have until 7:45, when Charley shows up, to get through this stuff in anything like a more or less uninterrupted way—after that, life is a kaleidoscope.
In that hour and 45 minutes, though, Cassie has to be fed and I need to get something to eat, since I hate being rushed and buffeted around during breakfast even more than I hate having to read student copy before dawn cracks. And the pool needs to be tended to. Again. That’s about 45 minutes or an hour of work.
Today is Wednesday from Hell, so these papers have to be read before 10:30 a.m. Either that, or I pick up the stuff around 9:30 and read until 11:00 p.m. Again. Assuming Cox stays up that late.
We finally landed a contract (well, in theory: I’ll believe it when I see it) from our would-be client in D.C. Pay is not great: to earn our target of $60 an hour, we’ll have to read 20 pages an hour. Speaking of needing a Stratoliner…
Anyway, we’re told this will happen in December. That’s good. Though I desperately need a break (is there a way of expressing how tired I am???), I’ve been sitting here wondering how on earth I’m going to get through December with no income. Eight months of pay is now no longer enough for me to live on.
If I don’t get a job soon or we don’t get credible, steady work through the editorial service, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Well, it’s not getting any earlier. So I’d better start reading this damn thing.
In he past when I have needed to earn extra money, I have done private tutoring either in my home or theirs. The hourly pay has not been that high but there is very little preparation/ grading especially wih the younger ones.
Just this morning as I was reading the debate in the Times over the degree to which immigrants need to have English to succeed in this country, it occurred to me that I could teach English to groups of aspiring English speakers.
However, if you’re a starving immigrant, you probably don’t have much money to spare. Wonder if it would be possible to get a grant to organize a small school for teaching English to newcomers…
In MN you must be licensed in ESL, even for adult classes. Even with a license there are no jobs here. Maybe AZ is much more flexible and needs teachers? Teaching adults who want to learn is very fun. Good luck.
i’m not one to talk, since I am very inefficient in grading, BUT…the papers that “take an hour to go through” are often that way because the student spent less than an hour writing it! We shouldn’t devote more time to a paper than was spent in the writing.
Yesterday, an online student visited Mr FS to find out “how he could pass.” He was somewhat surprised to find out that he had only turned in a small fraction of the assignments and had turned in an exam in under half the allotted time. When Mr FS asked him if he’d understood the comments on his work, student said “I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet.”
I’d never trust the ‘Cloud’.
@ George: Nope.
A Google spreadsheet will download as an Excel file. I copy it down to my hard disk every time I enter grades in the thing. And the graded stoont papers themselves are stored on my computer.