Is making steady progress

I just finished writing my monthly student reports. I added it up and there were 65 of them. Quite a lot of them finish with the phrase "S/He is making steady progress". This is a weasel phrase that is quite useful. Note that it does not say how much progress is being made, or how fast they are making progress, just that they are doing so at a steady rate. But it sounds good.

There is a code to the comments I wrote. There is a different between good, capable, quiet but capable and able students. Some students work well, while others work diligently. Some are active participants, some are enthusiastic participants. Others participate enthusiastically or actively.

Annoying kids get sometimes lacks focus, lacks focus, or is a distraction depending on how bad they are.

I think the best report would be something along the lines of "x is a good student who works well in class." followed by a more specific comment about a specific strength of the student. There are maybe one or two of those per class.

I have thought about writing a small program to automatically generate the reports. Something for the command line that would take a few arguments and then pick a few relevant comments and organise them in a random order (a lot of my reports sound kind of the same. Some variation would be good.). Of course, I only really think about this while I'm writing the reports, so it never actually gets done. At this stage, I'm probably better of just to keep writing them out, as I've kind of got into a routine with them.

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