Sink or swim

Or perhaps we just spoon feed you instead.

It’s only the second week of the second term, and I already feel like I’ve been here for several weeks. It’s that time of the year when various assessments in ToK, music, and English start coming due.

I’ve been spending inordinate amounts of time on written assignments. There have only been a few instances of copying, and a few where turnitin gets a bit too excited. A lot of it is formatting such as page breaks, font faces, and the bibliography.

House style here (well, my house style) is to put the rationale on the first page and start the task on the second. In spite of showing my classes how to do this by inserting a page break, it’s amazing how many of them belong to the school of Bash the Enter Key. Sigh.

Centring or right aligning text? Bash the Space Bar. Sigh.

Then bibliography has also been a fraught business, especially for the A2s. Even some of the HL class, whose bibliography is a single item, whose bibliography I created for them, still managed to make a mess of it. Then there’s the SL class, insisting that the author’s name is News, BBC, or using the name of the latest editor of Wikipedia pages as the author of the whole page, or appending a list of URLs after the entries.

I showed them how to create entries using Word. Even Word on a Mac can do such things, but even with a guide to how to make an MLA bibliography, my pupils still couldn’t do it. Some of them have managed to create entries in, er, Uzbek. Seriously. How? I have no idea.

Managebac isn’t helping, either. I need to upload files there so that I can put them through turnitin, but that often means leaving the page, returning there, reloading it, going away, crying, and then going through the whole process all over again.