Site icon gordsellar.com

Big Sigh of Relief

I was up until 4am this morning working on gradesheets and last-minute grading of a very leniently-graded set of creative assignments. Some of the stuff my Media English students did was really, well, as Lime put it, “Brilliant!” I wish I could post them online — I planned to do it on my class website, but I would need to get the files compressed much smaller than they are now. I’ll look into that later, and if I do, I’ll link to them from here.

The variety was stunning:

I don’t know why everyone doesn’t give final projects of this kind! For the record, Lime’s favorite was the children’s storybook, and mine was the one with the animal soldiers… but almost everything submitted was really quite brilliant. The only clanger was one “radio play” that was your standard Freshman Conversation textbook self-introduction monologue narrated dispassionately over a Moby song. Other than that, they were all fun. I think next time, I’m just going to focus the whole course on student-produced media, or, as students are all calling it now, UCC (User-Created Content). A few weeks for radio plays, a few weeks for a commercial, a few weeks for a children’s book or comic book, a month for a video drama… sounds like fun.

Sure beats the stacks of essays I graded for the days and days preceding. Anywa, my grades are all submitted, and now I just have to swat aside the emails begging me for higher grades. (I actually got one, no more than 30 minutes after the grades were entered into the system. I think I may just write up a form email for anyone who isn’t inquring about a possible grading error:

Dear _________,

It’s unfortunate that your grade is not as high as you would like. However, I assure you that it is exactly the grade you earned. If you need higher grades to remain in school/receive a scholarship/win travel-study grants, I suggest a little harder work during the semester. I will not be adjusting your grade, but perhaps one of your other professors might be willing to adjust your grade in their class.

Have a good summer!

Sincerely,

etc.

Hmm. I think that might be the form letter right there!

Exit mobile version