velvetpage | And the Marathon Begins with Velvetpage way behind. . . (Reply)

Well, I found out that I will not wipe out my comment bank if I enter stuff into this database at home and upload it at school. This is good, because it means I can type in the comments as I'm ready to apply them, getting each subject done in only twice as long as it would have taken me, if I had the comment bank saved here already.

I've just spent an hour and a half at this, and I'm making significant progress. I've done the easy subjects - music, art, social studies - for all the students I teach. I call them easy because the comment boxes for these are quite small, allowing for one expectations-related comment and one next step comment only. That means I only needed to write comments for all four levels of one expectation, and then two next step comments - one that says "continue to", for the kids doing well, and one that says "begin to", for those who aren't.

Now I'm into the French comments. I had them all neatly typed in, I'd done the cutting and pasting, and my principal would approve of the wordage and grammar in them. Then I applied them all. Then I actually looked at the screen that shows me what the reports will look like with that comment in them. THat's when I realized that I'd overestimated the size of the comment box for French, and I needed to go back and delete enough words to make it fit - for each student, individually. I can't just cut out one comment, because I have to comment on their oral communication, reading, and writing, and give a next step. So I have to go make each of those four sentences shorter while saying essentially the same thing. I got through three of them and decided I needed a break.

There's no way in hell I'll get the language comments done today. Not only do they require even more nitpicky stuff than the French ones, because the comment box is bigger, they also have to apply to each of the three grades I teach in my literacy class. Some comments differ by one word per grade, in which case I didn't worry about them; some are totally different expectations, in which case I have to worry about them.

I'm going to spend the next twenty minutes plunking out minor chords and diminished sevenths to reflect my mood. Then I'll play a couple of the pieces I've been fiddling with from my Christmas fake book. (As an aside, I finally figured out why I wasn't happy with the way I was playing "Still, Still, Still" - the book missed a chord, listing something as D+ when it was actually modulating to an F#- partway through. Because of what

rainwolf showed me on Friday, I finally figured out what was missing. It sounds much richer now.) Then I'm going to come back up here and modify those French comments until I'm blue in the face.