marking!

I *finally* finished marking my students' short stories. It took me a really, really long time, because a) I hate marking, and b) the damn kids can't write. I had a few that were really quite good, but so, SO many more that were poorly written in every way. Lame plots, very little detail / thought, and enough spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors to make any literate person vomit. I had to keep taking breaks. Anyway, I won't go into details about the travesties against the English language that I have been forced to witness, but suffice to say I had to just stop correcting a lot of them and try to muddle my way through to attempt to at least get the gist of the plot.

I just looked over at my aquarium and my giant algae eater is on the side of the tank facing me, and he scared the living crap out of me. The light is off, and his underside is lighter with crazy labyrinthy patterns on it, and ... he's enormous. Scary. It's a very pet-centred desk I have here, both of my cats are currently laying in front of the monitor, which makes it tricky to type this post.

What else is new. We have 2 weeks of school until exams, which is fun, because I've never prepared an English exam before. I'm hoping to get some help in that area from the other grade 9 teachers, and hopefully have a look at old exams for the 113 English and theatre arts classes. There's then a week of exams, 2 turn around days, and then 4 weeks and 2 days until March Break. That's when I'm done like dinner. Ack.

I need a hair cut, that's pretty exciting. I think that's it though. I need to go to bed; I've been staying up late all week for some reason, and it's definitely catching up with me.