The waiting game

I check my email. It's not there. I go do something else, come back and check my email, it's not there. We run errands, I come back and check my email, it's not there. It's 5:15, grades were due to our department office at 5. I check my email and it's still not there. I review the email memo about turing in class grades; if we (meaning us teachers) don't have our grades in to the department by Wednesday at 5, then we have to personally take them to the registar's office by 9 a.m. Thursday. I wake up this morning and check again, it's still not there. I check several times this morning. It's 10 a.m. and I still haven't received it.

Of course, I'm talking about my grade for my Theories class. At one point, I had an A in the class, but when we got our focus group project back, I started worrying that my A wasn't a sure thing. We got a B on the project, which was 25% of the grade. Although the prof had the projects for almost two weeks, and there were only two groups to grade (and the papers were only about 10 pages long), she admitted that she didn't spend a lot of time grading the projects and probably should have spent more time on the front end explaining how to conduct focus groups. However, she didn't take either fact into account when grading grading the projects, so we got a B.

Now we are down to the final paper, which is another 25% of the grade. She has 10 papers, 15-20 pages in length, turned in Monday night. She thought she might have the grades Tuesday night, but Wednesday was more likely. She mentioned that grades were due 9 a.m. Thursday and she had until then to finish. This was news to me, as I thought they were due Wednesday, until I went back to read the memo. Either way, she said she would email us our final grade.

It seems like my grade in the class may come down to what I make on the paper. If I do well, I keep my 4.0. Unfortunately, I feel like the grading is fairly subjective, and it depends more on if you give her what she wants. Too bad that none of us knew what that was.

So I check my email and wait, and then check email again. Maybe if I check one more time, the email will arrive.