All fouled up.
Yeah, so today at school, one of the other teachers comes to me and says "The papers your 11th graders are writing have to be on TWO books from this semester, not one from this semester and one from last." I knew that, and I had told them that, and photocopied the instructions, and gone over it, but when it came down to them submitting their topics, I didn't catch it when they did it wrong. So I have to take responsibility. Unfortunately, all that means for me is that I have to apologize. For them, it means they have to re-write their papers. On the bright side (for me), when we were discussing it, one of the students said "well, is it true that you can't write on the same book for both papers?" I asked where it said that, and SURE AS SHIT, there it was in bold print. But at least WE cleared this up today. See, the 12th graders' papers were already submitted to the grader. Worst case (and fairly likely) scenario? The 12th graders' papers are not eligible for grading and they don't get a passing score in English. In that case, they can still get a full diploma if their scores are high enough in every other class. Let's hope, huh?
I felt awful about my students, but I can't imagine what the 12th grade teacher must be feeling (I brought it to his attention as soon as we discovered it). It's SO confusing -- the directions are all clearly laid out, but not on the same page. The "you can't write two papers on the same book" rule is in an entirely different section than the "this paper must be on two part 1 works" section. My god, we went to lunch together today and were just slapping our foreheads about it. We also decided we are both going to read the ENTIRE book of rules this summer and maybe re-write them in a bullet-pointed format so that it's clear.
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