The Machine I Love . . .

. . . and my students hate; well, unless they've truly done the study time and know the stuff. So today was Quiz #2 for my students. People tell me often, okay, students tell me, "English is just too blankity, blank subjective!" So, years ago I chose to be a real oddball in my department and give students a Scantron multiple choice quiz (for some it is a multiple guess experience). It's basically an exercise in proofreading to prove whether or not they can recognize fragments, run-on sentences, know correct capitalization, or can locate all the prepositions in a sentence, or know when a sentence is lacking subject/verb agreement, and so on. It's certainly not the fun stuff of writing, but writing is not understandable, interesting, or fun to read if it is filled with flaws. So for the quiz they have to select, for example, which one of these is correct:

a. When I start my paper early, I have time to revise it.
b. Because revising a paper is really important for success.

or

a. She likes math, she doesn't like history.
b. She has always been a good student but has never made A's.


So today my students could no longer say, "Well, I didn't know what to expect!" That statement makes some sense after Quiz #1, but not now.

Eight weeks of the semester is now completed and some of the students are facing the reality that they are not doing the work. Because the class is a hybrid--half online and half in the class--they think they are going to get full credit for doing half the work. Many of them should have realized the fallacy of that after the first quiz. So today produced some victories and some defeats.

I am receiving wonderful comments from students who are starting to "get it" and are experiencing a lack of confusion because of knowing grammar and punctuation and the thrill of writing something that others enjoy reading.

This day for me, meant I didn't have to haul another batch of student papers out of the classroom and to my office to be read. Instead, I had my second sweet rendezvous with the Scantron scoring machine whispering sweet nothings to it as it scored their answers. All I did was put one master/answer key form through the machine first and then feed the rest of the forms through quickly one-at-a-time. You can see it above on the bottom left frame.

You gotta know what a weirdo I looked like standing in the workroom taking photos of the Scantron machine will trying to run the forms through. Anything for a Blip, huh! So that's my story for today.

Today I should have written about my dad. This is his 83rd birthday. He died almost 18 years ago in December of 1991. The writer in me couldn't write that text today. I'm about to lose a brother-in-law. Mr. Fun's little brother--only brother, only sibling--is dying of liver failure and has been put on Hospice. He is just a year older than me. He lives in the Palm Springs area. Mr. Fun is there now. That's a story for another day too.

Good night from Southern California.
Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol