I’ve written before about the post-marking malaise but today’s was especially odd.

I tried spacing my marking out more this term. In the past I’ve usually done intense bursts of marking followed by burn out, malaise, denial, more marking and lots of British detective dramas. (And that’s just the first two days.) This term though I had a daily quota. I did a percentage of the tests each day and then stopped. The theory was the quota would leave me time to do other things which would eliminate the malaise.

It didn’t quite work that way.

Marking has a habit of stretching out to fit the time available. Even after all my years of teaching I can only take student writing in small bursts. Part of this is a result of reading dozens of different types of handwriting writing written in different shades of pencil grey.  I’d like to require my students to write in pen but I don’t have the patience for the memos and meetings that requirement would involve. (Also, the cross outs and rewrites would get sloppy and probably be even harder to read.)

Reading grey writing on average quality paper begins to hurt the eyes after a while. That and the bad English slowly ruins the brain and I have to do something else for a while. That slows the process down. Then, after I finished my quota, I find I’m too tired to do anything else.

Now that I’m finished with my marking, I’m trying to reorder my brain into doing other stuff. The problem is that involves organizing stacks of stuff that has been set off to the side to make space for exam papers. I’ve got notebooks and pens from the ISOT that I want to test. I have a list of people I met at the ISOT I want to contact. I have a list of products I want to review and I have no idea is some of them are actually for sale yet.

The problem with that is the initial inspiration for most of what’s in the piles has been lost. Also, they’ve been mixed as they’ve been moved and removed and moved again. The sorting takes time and doesn’t actually count as doing something productive.

Tomorrow is a light day–mostly double checking marks and getting ready for pass backs–and it’s a chance to do something productive.

That doesn’t mean I’ll do something productive, but at least I’ll have the chance.