Speed Demon

More thoughts on how teachers spend their time:

I started grading projects at 11:30am this morning and finally finished the grading portion at 5pm (plus about another hour of entering grades, sorting papers, creating and emailing lists of kids who need to revise, and all that other business mess). I'd say that I took about a total of 45 minutes in that time for little breaks--checking email, texting, refilling my coffee, using the bathroom due to coffee refills. So that comes out to 330 minus 45 minutes of grading for 105 projects. Amazingly that divides into an average of 2.71 minutes per project. If I add the other 60 minutes of business, that means I spent an average of 3.28 minutes per student today.

In some ways I am proud of this; I expected it would probably take me about 5 minutes per project, which comes out to 8.75 hours. On the other hand, I did not finish early enough to take advantage of today's 90-degree weather so the day was already a wash in terms of my emotional health. On the other hand (yes, I have 3 hands), my kids spent about a week working on these projects (at least 5 hours of time per kid, I reckon). And in return I spent between 2.71 and 3.28 minutes thinking about each of them. There some sort of proportional reasoning lesson in there.

I don't know what to make of this data. What I do know is that I have about 2 more hours worth of work tonight before I'm ready for tomorrow.