Enough marking to choke a camel

 Yes, it is Senior exam week and there is a great, great deal of marking to do. So sad.

But, on the other hand, there are fewer classes to teach, hence more 'free' time to do the marking in. Hmm.

The rough thing with English marking is that you have to wade through each piece of writing, and measure it against criteria like ideas and stlye and accuracy and structure. The fun thing is that there aren't any concrete guidelines, such as more than 8 errors per page = Not Achieved. Instead, we get to play with uses writing conventions without intrusive errors, which is defined in the notes as writing is expected to be free of distracting errors in the writing conventions that are characteristic of a draft.

So, nice and precise :)

Actually, it gets very easy to mark short stories when you stop worrying about the language of the achievement standard, and decide whether the story is OK, Good or Great. There are quite a few OK (or even Good or Great) stories that fall over because the student can't spell, or punctuate speech, or whatever. They end up with a big fat Not Achieved, regardless of how good their storytelling skills are, because they lack mechanical accuracy. Hm.

So, now I have 2 hours to do marking in, and a headache which is subtly suggesting that I go home, have a bite to eat, and go to bed. I shall probably compromise, and do an hour of marking before shuffling off a little early. Silly sore head.