I can feel your heart beat faster

[Take Me Home Tonight (Be My Baby), Eddie Money]

Today I contemplated jumping off a cliff.

Ok, not really. But I did manage to magically erase my entire gradebook...

My computer crashed in the middle of saving my grades (which I do almost constantly when I am working on them). When I tried to open them, it said the file was corrupt. I got the genius idea to try and open a new gradebook and import the old grades. Only then I accidentally overwrote the corrupt file because in my frustration I clicked too many times. Despite saying "no" to saving it, when I figured out how to open the grade back-up file (which I didn't know existed, but I spent a long time trying to rescue the THREE FRIEKING THOUSAND ENTRIES) I discovered it, too, was already overwritten by the blank book.

Just remembering the frustration conjures back up the temptation [read: not really] to kill myself. Plus... last semester I meticulously wrote down every single grade and then entered it in the computer... this semester I realized that I could cut the process into about 1/3 of the time by just directly entering stuff.

And no, I didn't copy the grades from my jump drive (where they were saved) onto my laptop. I was going to after school got out and the gradebook was essentially complete. Now... I just get to hope I remember their grades and be lenient with what they can make up.

This is life hating material, kids, right here, right now. Barf.

That said, I realized earlier that I could be super angry or I could cry (or I could jump off a cliff) but really that wouldn't change things. The grades are still gone forever. So I can just suck it up, talk to each kid individually about where they were at (I know about 60 of them right off my head as far as letter grade goes, just not exact percentage, and there are about 15 where I need to figure out where they were) after I write out where I think each kid was. Good thing we have block scheduling and I have 75 kids instead of 150. Too bad that file had all of my grades from this entire year.

I will never, EVER again fail to copy my gradebook onto both my PC at home and my laptop.

Lessons learned, lessons learned.