You know when the semester is coming to an end when the marking starts piling up. Tests, essays, journals all have to be cleared out before the end of the term. This semester I had Musical Theatre production responsibilities and a student teacher as well, so the backlog looked pretty daunting for a while.

The fact that I now have enough time to blog about it means that I am whittling down the pile to a reasonable size. The stack in front of me here is the unit test on Hamlet, which I polished off on the weekend. The larger stack is the end of term essays, which is currently a work in progress.

Essays are a much higher hill to climb, as they require grammar and syntax assessment, form and citational references, organization, and of course content marks. I am so happy that the school broke down and bought some anti-plagiarism software, as that used to take a ton of time to check. Now that can be done in minutes. But all the other stuff is still pretty time consuming.

I figure at this level – final draft, having seen the essay three previous times – it takes me about 20 minutes to half an hour per paper. I try to mark six per night. That way I can keep up with the six presentations I hear each day in class. Some coffee and some classical music help get me through. That and the fact that Pam is on the other side of the world and I have nothing else to do in the evening!