The Comeback

Second period English. Tenth grade (although the boys in the class are officially in twelfth grade). It's summer session, so they're making up credits they're missing. 

It was day seventeen of the eighteen-day summer session. We had been reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and doing assignments that went along with the reading. I had been doing a daily edit activity where I give them two sentences with errors that we'd correct together. And they had a daily writing assignment (three to five sentences on a topic I provided). 

They had work. They had largely ignored it.

So, on day seventeen I gave them a peek at their grades. I had done this a couple times before, but it wasn't making an impact. But on this day, their forty-ish percents finally made an impression on them. On day seventeen, both Vincent and Brandon got to work. 

They were missing several of their daily journal topics. They completed them. Various online assignments got done. And I barely kept up with the grading as one after another after another assignment was turned in.

By the end of the period, Vincent was in C territory, and Brandon had just gotten into the Ds. Brandon even did some work that evening, and by Friday he had pulled his grade up to a C. 

I'll take it. (I did tell them at the beginning that I accepted all late work.) I had been worried that I would be giving out only Fs, and I did not want to do that.