And We're Back!

Our break is now officially over.

I traveled and visited family, and that was great, but tiring.  Then I traveled back, and did home stuff, and graded a lot, and that was tiring.

So now I feel like I need a break.

My neighbor dog is visiting, which is lovely.  She takes me out for a walk whenever she can convince me, and I much appreciate her enthusiasm.  And when she gets up in the morning, she's already wagging and throws herself into that big stretch thing with her tail going so hard it wriggles her whole rear end. 

So, I have a few things still to grade, but no huge piles.  I got a goodly amount of work done over break.  And I got some sunshine.

Next up, midterm reports.  I am amused to see that I blogged about midterm grades before.  What's changed for me is that last semester I went to the computer help folks and got a lesson in using mail merge for excel and word, and now I can put things together.  Well, assuming I can either find the directions I wrote myself or figure it out by playing with it, I can put things together.  That should help!

I started the process with my first year writing students today, by giving them copies of their grade sheets and going through the math with them.  It saddens me that some of them can't add a few single digit numbers in their heads (or so it seems: they pulled out calculators).