Another Monday begins

It's that time of the week again - Monday. Monday morning, no less. 52 of them every year, and they never get any better than mediocre.

For me, Monday usually means three things.

First of all, it's the day I collect in the workbooks of my class at the Secondary School. I have 34 students, which means that I collect, assuming they all give me them, 68 books. The books are divided in two. One of them is for Grammar and Vocabulary, and the other is for Reading and Writing. Unfortunately, some of my students didn't manage to grasp this detail at the beginning of the year, so some of them have got Grammar and Reading, or one of any other strange combination. Then there's the issue of them getting confused by their own organisation and then putting work in the wrong book, meaning that I have to search both of their books in order to locate work. As it is, I promised my students at the beginning of the year that I would give them back their books, fully graded, the following day. This means that I have from roughly 09:00 until 15:00 to grade all 68(ish) books. Luckily I have developed a skill for 'speed grading' - that is being able to memorise the correct answers and scan for them. I can usually get one book done in around 3 - 5 minutes, depending on how much work I gave them to do. This useful skill came from being an exam moderator; when you've got 100 candidates to get through, speed and accuracy are vital.

It's not only grading which I have to do on Mondays, however. I also have two sessions with the aforementioned class - one at 07:50-08:40, and the other at 11:35-12:25. The first session is usually a disaster, as the class are reunited again after a weekend off. This morning I gave them a choice - finish checking and make last minute completions of the work from last week and do new work which I had planned for this morning as homework, or forget about the work from last week/ be smug that it was all finished, and do the work I'd planned for this morning in class. The majority of them did one or the other...a couple of students chose a third option, which was to attempt to insert one other student headfirst into the classroom bin. This I was not impressed with, and if hadn't already requested meetings with their parents I would have done so for this. It was amusing though...

Also, as the English coordinator at the Elementary school, I have a world of other things to do. I like to visit all the classes on Monday for example, and see how they are doing. I have grades to check. I have to check the lesson plans of all the teachers, and make sure that a) they have actually done one and b) that it's good. In addition to this I need to make sure that everybody's fine for the week and that they are up to date on other things, such as the bulletin boards outside the classrooms.

Mondays are busy. But, they do go quickly.