Marking Time

You may remember that I wrote about Markolepsy fairly recently; a term that I coined to describe a condition suffered by English teachers. In a nutshell, marking is extremely soporific, so we fall asleep mid-essay, which results in us marking essays with blotted ink and droplets of sleep-induced saliva rather than ticks, “sp” and “punc”.

I’ve spent a few hours marking this weekend in various states of consciousness. In between bouts of marking and sleeping, I’ve thought of another argument against those people who say that teachers aren’t allowed to complain about teaching because of all the holidays they get.

I get this all the time, you see. Whenever I tell anyone that I'm a teacher, the first thing they comment on is the holidays, usually with an expression of poorly disguised jealous hatred on their face.

Now, I agree that teachers of subjects like Maths should get less holiday time. After all, each question in their subject has only one correct answer and they don’t have to do any reading when they mark. I agree that teachers of PE don’t deserve their long holidays. Their subject has no answers at all and no writing whatsoever. Standing around in a field all day shouting, "Point that elbow!" or "Run, boy, run!" is hardly work, is it? I also think that Geography teachers should have their holidays reduced because all they have to mark is how effectively maps of Brazil have been coloured in.

English teachers stand alone (which either sounds like the title of Morrissey’s next single or a Labour party slogan) because we have to read so much stuff. This means we do more work than teachers of other subjects. It’s obvious, isn’t it?

There’s more to it than that, though. It’s not just reading. I enjoy reading, after all. But can you imagine reading 30 pretty much identical essays in a row? Correcting the same errors? Making sure that the comment at the end of each piece of work is different in case they compare them, even though they don’t pay any attention to them anyway, because if they did I wouldn’t be correcting the same errors in every piece of work?

English teachers are actually working on negative time. To put it another way, it feels like it takes longer than it actually takes to do marking. The gears of the universe creak and strain when I pick up the red pen. The machinery of time starts to work in reverse as I tick and underline. It doesn't start immediately, either, because I always start off fresh. If it takes three minutes to mark the first two-page essay in the pile, then I’m probably down to two and a half minutes by the fifth as I get into a rhythm. However, once I get past this, I become so horrendously bored that each two and a half minutes feels like twice as long as it actually is. Once I get to the tenth essay (assuming I’m still awake), even though I’ve only been marking for 27 and a half minutes, it feels like 40. The trend continues exponentially.

The experience of marking reminds me of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which a priest describes eternity as being like a seagull flying for decades to a beach where it picks up a solitary grain of sand and carries it back, which also takes it decades. Eternity ends when the beach is empty of sand.

This also describes the experience of reading Joyce, too.

So, English teachers actually lose, and are owed, time. Particularly when on a marking marathon like the one I’ve been on this weekend. According to my calculations, I’ve been marking for 36 out of the last 24 hours this weekend. And in my seven year “career” so far, I should now be enjoying my second retirement.

NB No calculations were actually calculated.

Here's a photo of the pile this weekend. As you can see, it's almost the size of a CD: