Homework

I spent today marking homework. Streaming really works, I've found. I found myself giving the high level classes very high marks, and the low level classes very low marks. This is because the high level students made an effort to do a good job, and it showed. (That is, of course, how they ended up in the high level classes in the first place.) They wanted to learn something, and did.

My low level students, however, clearly didn't put much time or effort into their homework, and often didn't even copy things accurately. When they were supposed to write something partly copied from the textbook they'd add spelling mistakes, and miss or add letters or words. There were exceptions, of course. There were a few who obviously spent some time on their homework, and they scored high.

The most annoying thing is when I get the same awful homework several times from students in the same class, who have obviously 'helped' each other. Generally this is not good work to start with, but then mistakes get copied and multiplied and you frequently end up with something that make no sense at all. In one spectacular series of copied-from-each-other homework assignments I checked today the word clean started off as crean, morphed into crern, then cleart, and finally cteart. What did they think they were writing, I wonder?

Reading this kind of homework takes me on a roller coaster of hilarity and despair. Despair from words like cteart, and hilarity from sentences like this one, my favourite of today's lot:

Jeff would like to have a big dong but he can't, because he lives in a small apartment.