It was 3:30 a.m. before my head finally hit the pillow last night. After I maneuvered my way through that PSOW form (I posted about that yesterday) I wanted to read through all of the IAs one more time just to make sure I was as accurate as possible with my marking.
The seniors walked in to my classroom at 10:55. We only needed to compile the paper work. It’s simple. The two internal assessments (IAs) each with their respective document outlining the awarded marks, the teacher guidelines for all practical work and the PSOW form signed by the respective student and me. Yet, it took an hour. I think I had to reprint a couple of the documents five times before they were correct. Some of the students needed an IA printed in color. One PSOW required dates to be changed. It seems that no matter how well one prepares these documents the need for changes always arise. However, finally all of the forms were neatly ordered in cover slips and stacked sleekly awaiting shipment. The IB Coordinator and I made sure the marks were uploaded online and then we were done.
There is such relief in having a deadline met. I think I'll be glad that I stayed up late last night so that I could meet the deadline ahead of time with a quality product. Some of my posts have generated a discussion on the fact that we need to teach students to meet their deadlines. So do you think they’ll take notice of the fact that all of their IA deadlines in all of their subjects were met in advance of the actual shipment deadline? Can they see that even though we ran into several glitches it was relatively stress free because we had allotted ourselves the time? Is that enough to motivate them? What do you think? How do we actually teach students to meet deadlines?