Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Wordless Wednesday: Caught Reading...

Ignore the blink, he was reading this.
For fun.
While on Semester Break.

and I couldn't resist a picture of The Adventurer,
who knows that breaks are for playing.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Fall Break!!

whew! We did it!! We survived the exams, all the grades are in except for Geometry, and our first semester of on-line school is over!!!! yay!!!

Assuming a passing grade on the Geometry exam (and I have no reason to think it won't be), The Writer will finish the semester with 3 As and 2 Bs. We are so stinkin' proud of him!!!  He has worked so hard, and now, time for a much-deserved, hard-earned break!

The Artist finished science; we're waiting on that grade still but expect an A. Hooray!! He has a few weeks of English left, because the school did not release the new English course at the same time and so that course doesn't finish up until early May. I  have checked his schedule, and he will be able to take the next three weeks off with us and then pick up English and finish it; he'll just have to work later at the end of next semester to finish that English course.

So, a three week break. Wow. We'll start our 2nd semester right after Easter.  Meanwhile, I'll be busy sewing and quilting and organizing/decluttering, and I trust the boys will find things to keep themselves busy as well.

Hope your school year is going well!

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Exam Update

Well, half way through the week and The Writer has finished 3 of his 5 exams.  We are all feeling a little less intimidated, thank goodness.

We had a minor snafu with the Geometry exam -- the school sent our Proctor a printable exam, which the Proctor printed and administered to The Writer. He used a #2 pencil, as instructed, which turns out to have been a bad idea.

The Proctor had to scan in the exam and email it back to the school. Pencil doesn't show up well in a scan, so we're waiting to hear back from the school how to fix it --- can he, in the presence of the Proctor, trace over his answers in pen and rescan it? Will they instead send out another exam for him to retake? We have no idea.

Of course, this morning I checked his Geometry grades (why I didn't do this yesterday is beyond me), hoping that even though I'd not received the standard emails letting me know the chapters had been graded, that maybe the grades were there anyway.

They were.

Including a grade for the review exercise, which was very similar to the final exam.

The review itself was just a completion grade, but the teacher is going to send out a step-by-step correction to every single problem so that The Writer can check over every problem, follow along, make corrections and study for the exam.

The exam he took yesterday before I saw that this email will be coming.

The exam that is sort of already turned in, because The Proctor sent in the illegible scan, to find out what the school wants us to do to fix said scan.

Why oh why oh why didn't I check this yesterday?????

(sigh)

Oh well. What's done is done, and I did look over his review before we turned it in, and I don't think he did poorly on the review. Which means, if he did the exam in the same fashion, he probably did okay. He has exactly a 90 average so far in Geometry, pending the final exam. The exam is worth 25% of his final grade, so if he passes the exam (which he must, in order to pass; it's a strange loophole the school has), he'll have an 85 overall. That's with the minimum passing grade on the exam. So, really, I think he'll be okay. I'm just kicking myself that we pushed ahead and thus robbed ourselves, robbed him, of this tool that would have helped him do even better.

As for the other exams, he has completed Health and World Geography. Those are partially graded already, as they were completed on-line and so the multiple choice, True/False and Matching type questions were auto-graded; his grade could increase on each one if he did well on the short-answer type questions. As it is, he did well enough on each of those exams to maintain his A average in those two classes. Yay! I am so very  proud of him!!

Today, the Biology exam. Tomorrow, English. I am feeling, and I think he is too, much more relaxed now. He is doing so very well, and I am so very proud of him. Not just for the grades, which are fantastic, but for his work ethic, his determination, and this proof of his good character above all else. The good grades are, for me, gravy.