Paranoia Pays Off

On Friday, the whole Google Classroom system crashed for the school. By Monday, they were able to sort of restore the students' email accounts so they could access the Google Meets. But it was a temporary thing. 

We were warned not to use Google Classroom until the system was restored. When they reassociated the students' email accounts with their classwork accounts, anything the students did in the between times (from the time the system crashed until it was restored) would be wiped out.

But how do you get assignments to students at home during a pandemic? Email? (That's very, very time consuming, not to mention going through all the emails to grade it. Eeek.) 

Now, there are a couple other systems in place, but I do not have access to them. They figured the sub wouldn't need them. (I did try to get an account early on in the school year when I was on a different assignment, but it never happened, and by the time I'd follow up, I was done covering that class.) 

There was nothing else to do. I assigned them work on Google Classroom, but with the caveat that they'd need to back up their work to a different system somehow, as once their accounts were restored, that work would be lost. 

But eighth graders. I knew this was going to go awry for some of them.

I got paranoid. 

Daily, I went and graded all work that was turned in. I immediately recorded it in the gradebook. Up until now I had been waiting to grade things until after they were due so I could grade them all at once. But I just knew...

Thursday I got an email from a student. His account had been restored. And the assignment he had completed had gone poof. (He had thought his account was safe, that it had been restored the day prior.) 

I checked. Yup, I'd graded it. It had a score in the gradebook. 

Once we got word that the accounts were mostly restored, I went back through the week's assignments to make sure they showed as completed. I found three other students' work that had "incomplete" when I had a score for them.

I'm so glad I did that grading when I did.