6300
That's the number of entries I have as of tonight in my AllChina Gradebook which I started catching up with updating during the 4 day holiday.
Let me backtrack... I've been teaching since 1990 and back then, I first also started using a computer. I'm self-taught, as I attended college in the late 70's and the only computer class I had used punch cards fed into a card reader (I forget the tech term for that- Fortran?)
When I finally splurged for my first computer, it was a Tandy because RadioShack was all over the Sunday newspaper supplements. This was about 1988 and there were no learning tools for using computers, So I hit up the local library and started taking out books on DOS and BASIC. That's what the Tandy ran, and with no hard drive. Just 5'¼ floppy disks. There were tandem disk drives, so I could actually run two floppies at once. and Windows came out with OFFICE (It might not have been called that then, but they had Word). I started tinkering with Word and trying to make it work on a two floppy disk system. I figured that out on my own using library books and experimentation.
Then I got interested in Spreadsheets. Excel hadn't been born yet and Lotus 1-2-3 was the standard (and the original spreadsheet program until Microsoft stepped in and decided to dominate the Office Suite. So in 1990, while teaching, I decided to write a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet to keep track of my classes, grades and attendance. All of it self-taught. The following year at my school- a community college- at the initial departmental meeting, the Dean said that since office technologies were becoming more important, they wanted to offer some courses in that. Could anyone/Would anyone be willing to teach those? I offered to do it, neophyte and self-taught as I was, because no one else was willing, and because by then I thought I had a pretty good handle on the stuff. PLUS, prepping for classes like that inspires deeper learning. So I did it for 3 semesters as additional work, and I'm glad I did. By then Microsoft was coming out with their Office programs and I was updating my own skill set from Lotus-Wordperfect to Word for Windows; Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel. I even got the college teacher discount for Micrsoft Office through the college bookstore. In fact I brought the whole thing with me when I came to China in 1998. All 32 3.5 inch disks in the set.
So, back then, I converted my 1991 Lotus 1-2-3 classroom spreadsheets to MS Excel(XLS). In 2007, I went over from the dark side and got my first Mac. What had held me back was the fact that I had so many files in various MS formats (word doc, Excel wks) that I didn't wanto lose all that work.
In 2007 I bit the bullet-used my airfare bonus to buy a Macbook rather than fly home. It was a Christmas present to myself. And I've never looked back. I spent the 2008 Spring Festival reading up on Mac OS X. and hit the ground running when the semester started. I converted all the old Word/Xls stuff to the new system and rewrote my old student spreadsheets into a coherent LMS (Learning Management System) I could handle class-by-class for each of my classes. I have been religious in doing this-both setting up each spreadsheet for each class the first week of classes, through following on to the end of the class, and then handling final assessments and grades. Again, I've been religious about keeping the up-to-date.
Where I have been lax is in transferring this data to my AllChina Gradebook that I started to assemble years ago when I made the move to Mac.
I spent the last couple of days updating the records for my classes that I've neglected, and tonight my Numbers spreadsheet hit 6300. Thus the lead to this story.
I now have 6300 records of my students' performance in my AllChina numbers database. Some students have taken my courses for more than one semester, so I cannot claim 6300 unique students. But Iwas still surprised by how many I've taught. And I still have 4 more semesters to catch up on to bring it up-to date.
Now, to today...