Last weekend I planned to celebrate spring by going for a long walk, maybe popping out into the garden, and
dusting down a few surfaces now that the sun is strong enough to highlight all the inch-thick Miss Haversham
style dust settled on surfaces everywhere. Instead I waded (literally – at one point I was trapped in my
chair with nowhere to place my legs) through the piles of paperwork strewn all over my study floor, sorting
projects into piles and exercise books into groups of ten to give myself some incentive to get down to
marking: ten books marked and I could have my breakfast, the next ten and I could check my email, the following
ten and I could scan the headlines of the Sunday papers, and so on.
I started off quite well on the Sunday morning after a Saturday of making resources and trying to get my printer to work. I was up around 6am, although I didn’t realise it at the time; I thought it was an hour later as I’d misread my clock. But by half nine, as the rest of the neighbourhood started to wake up, I’d marked one set of Year 10 coursework and was feeling rather efficient. After ploughing through essays the rest of the work looked like a doddle, but I was foolishly mistaken. Almost twelve hours and several snack stops later, I gave up, although there was still a pile of work to do.
So. The weekend was over. I’d failed at: dusting, healthy eating, keeping on top of my marking, getting
some fresh air, doing any exercise, reading the week’s papers, and even getting dressed. Instead, all I could
do was to brace myself, firstly for the long slog from car to classroom with crates of books and papers in
the morning, and secondly for the handful of sarcastic comments from parents at Parents’ Evening, whose
child’s book hasn’t been marked for a while because (a) there are not enough hours in the day, and (b) the
kid didn’t hand it in the last time I took them all in and found time to mark them.
In twelve hours I’d gone from feeling chuffed with my own efficiency and pleased with the standard of a class’s coursework, to feeling frustrated and hair-rippingly angry at the way the day had slipped by, at imaginary parents and their all too real demands, and at the state of my job which throws more and more work my way all the time.
What I’d like to know is, when does everyone else do their marking? When I leave on a Friday afternoon,
everyone seems to have exciting plans for their weekends: watching the football, antiquing in some cute town,
visiting friends and relatives, stag parties or weddings, taking their kids here there and everywhere,
going to concerts, having bargain weekends away in bland hotels. Right now, I can’t remember the last time
I had a weekend without some form of marking or preparation. Plus I do some work at home every day of the
week (except Friday usually, because I know I’ve got the weekend…). I’m not so much ranting as having a
bloody good whinge, but it’s enough to knock the stuffing out of anyone, I’m sure.
All I know is that come Monday morning, I begrudge going into school and I dread the bleating of “Have you marked our books yet?” It’s horrible to feel I’ve let the kids down by not returning their work straight away, fully annotated, as they’re not to know the anguish it all brings me. Sometimes if they really nag, I break it down for them (cross curricular links with numeracy and all that): if each of the thirty has written an average of 1,500 words, that’s 45,000 words I have to read. Almost a novel. And not just normal words, either, but mis-spelled and misplaced words, words that are jumbled together without full stops or capital letters, and sometimes words that look suspiciously like somebody else’s words.
And then there are the comments I write. If I spend five minutes writing comments on each pupil’s work, that’s two and a half hours of me scrawling away in red pen. By the time I’ve finished explaining this, hopefully their eyes have glazed over and they’re ready to stop moaning. I don’t even bother mentioning mark schemes and the hours it takes to decipher those ready to apply to whatever the piece of work is.
“At least,” people are quick to tell me, “the holidays are nearly here.” Wrong. At least I won’t have to get dressed to go to work, you mean. Instead, I’ll use my time off school over Easter to catch up with marking in my pyjamas, ready to start the new term with a clean slate, just in time for exams season. Oh lordy, I really hate my job at weekends.
added 31/3/06
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