End of the 9 weeks rant!

The end of the first 9 weeks is rapidly approaching; it ends on Monday. I cannot believe that I’ve been teaching full-time now for 5 entire weeks and I’ve only got about 5 weeks left! With the end of the first 9 weeks grading period comes a lot of stress! I have students constantly asking me to make up work and it has begun to get frustrating! My mentor teacher and I have a strict policy that students are not to make up work during class, but rather they should come before school, at lunch, or after school. Well, our students don’t really like giving up their free time to complete missed work, so they rarely ever show up. However, they expect us to let them make their work up during class which, in essence, would put them even further behind because they’d be missing another day. I have reminded students several times that they need to do their work at the scheduled time and it seems like every new day, someone asks me to make up work during class. I have become frustrated with the situation and I’m not quite sure what should to be done. On one hand, I don’t want to fail students for missing work, but on the other, they should be responsible enough to come make their things up when we tell them to do so. I can honestly say that teachers have a lot more to deal with than I ever thought possible. I don’t know how they put up with some of the things they have to put up with! I only hope that I can figure it all out before I have my own classroom.