Marking Mania

Sometimes life in the Green and Pleasant Land is neither green nor pleasant.  Sometimes, as in Vietnam, weekends are spent marking students' work, and I mean whole weekends.  Entire days.  Church is sacrificed, as is time spent with loved ones: many cups of tea are drunk and after a little while, the positive and 'can do' attitude that begins the day with you thinking, 'It'll feel so satisfying to get this pile done' descends into manic desperation and horror at the thought that a) you have only marked two books in the last 40 minutes, b) you still have 12 books to go c) you might not actually get through all 12 books and d) what about the washing, ironing, documents that have to be presented at the police station because of that stupid speeding ticket, cleaning, Waitrose order, presentation for summer work telephone interview and hair cut that was also supposed to happen this weekend?

Just in case you're not a teacher, or an English/Humanities teacher and don't spend copious hours of your life marking, here is an amusing record of my stream of consciousness on this Sunday afternoon.

13:33 (have been marking since approximately 9:30)  Text to husband reads, Marking is like death.  It takes so long.

14:00  Text to husband reads, OMG.  This child has written a whole paragraph without full stops.  Wtf?!?!?!?!?!?!?!:£:9)1717-:??).)  I stare at this child's book and do not know where to start with my marking.  I procrastinate by beginning to write a blog post about it.

14:08  The TV Licensing man comes to check whether we are lying about not having a TV.  I literally jump up at the excuse to leave my books.  No we don't have a TV!  If we had a TV, would I be spending my days marking terribly punctuated descriptive passages about the emotional conflict of choosing between Fifa 15 or Watch Dogs?  No!  I would be watching gardening programs and becoming addicted to Game of Thrones like the rest of the world!

14:33 Delight as a remember that one child has left her exercise book at her father's house and thus it is not in my marking pile!  I gleefully add her name to my detention list and recount: only 9 to go!

14:46 One child has not done their homework!  This means I do not have to mark it!  It is bad that this fills me with elation...?

14:47  I select my next book based on which child has the least stressful handwriting.

15:01 With 7 books to go, I give up and promise to come back to it later.  I cannot go on and expect to keep my sanity in tact.  What else is on my to do list?

16:26  I get back on it with renewed vigour for I am not a quitter and I will overcome.

16:30  Text from husband reads Are u done?  I suppress a sob at the feeling of inadequacy and shame and insufficiency as I am nowhere near done.

16:58  In response to a task title, 'Write about an experience of emotional conflict', one child does not write about the conflicting decision between KFC or Morleys chicken, but the strokes her mother suffered, her mother's strength, her own depression, her shame of feeling bullied and alone when her mother was acting as such a pillar of strength, her mother's death, her loneliness at school and her eventual salvation and the company provided by her 'naturally kind' best friend who 'held out her hand' and told her that she 'wasn't alone and made her cry for the first time (in a good way)'.  Oh.  Urgh.

I am her English teacher, and thus have to give her literacy targets.  It just doesn't seem like the right thing to do, does it?

Child: 'Write numbers as letters'?  Honestly, who gives a crap?  I have bigger shit to deal with, Ms Sheppard!
Ms Shep: yes... um... but if you could just respond in green pen, then that would be great... um.  Thanks...?  Uncomfortable hand on shoulder in attempt at comfort...

17:05 Realisation that above child was absent when homework was set and thus this is one less piece of writing to mark.  YES.

17:15  My neck hurts and without warning I feel a slightly hysterical sob forming at a child's incorrect use of verb tenses.  It is time to stop, but there are still four books left and there will be no time between now and Wednesday when they will be responding to my red pen.  This is very stressful and I hate that 25 green books have consumed my weekend: it makes me very angry at the injustice of it all.  These are all slightly exaggerated emotions to be directed towards a big stack of paper.  Thus I will finish this book, maybe ignore 'I choosed my mum' and start planning some lessons instead.  At least this will provide some variety and free up some after school time which might mean that the books get marked in time...

Gosh. Now you know why teachers get so violently furious when people say completely idiotic things like 'oh, but you finish at 3:30pm and get all those holidays, so you can't possibly work that hard'. HATRED. 

The marking never stops but just as a post script, check out this beautiful poem in the style of Tennyson's 'The Eagle':

Obviously this poem is about a tiger, not an eagle because eagles don't bite cows.

What is important to point out is that his child followed avert strict grammatical frame to write this and dammit, he knows what a noun, verb, adjective and preposition is!