Niki's English 101 Blog and Writing Sources

At this point in the semester, it's fairly standard fare for me to receive an ungodly number of "my grade is atrocious!" emails when the panicking students are only missing one or two assignments. It's very important to remember throughout the semester that your grade will always be out of proportion to reality until your final drafts are turned in at the end of the semester. For example, I noticed today upon changing one student's 0 to 20 on the Library Treasure Hunt that his grade went up 11%. That was just one homework assignment. The difference is even greater if you're missing five or ten points on your rough draft due to forgetting to email it to me and/or having not conferenced with me over it yet. We just don't have that many points yet, so one missing assignment makes a much bigger difference now than it does later in the semester.

So before you freak out, take a look at which grades have a zero listed next to them. If they're one or two assignments' worth of small points in the long run or rough draft points that will be made up soon upon conferencing with me, there's no need to panic. However, if you've turned in next to nothing, and that's why your grade is the pits, then you need to do some self-reflection.

Also, remember that there's a difference between a zero and a blank. A zero means I did not receive it. A blank means I'm still in the process of grading it--especially in the area of blogs, since the way the system is set up, I need to do them all at once, because once I close the browser window, I lose all the notifications about which blog entries and which comments are new--and that's a tallying nightmare. Can you see your blogs, and can everyone else see them as well? Are they on time (or close)? Did you complete your commenting quota for the week? Then you know you're going to get those points.

So... breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out....