I am not proud of this but I’m not ashamed either. Way back when I used to work at a private school with a rather unenlightened administration. Just to take an isolated example of asinine administrative logic, I once pointed out, convincingly, that the use of random, out of context lists of vocabulary words is a pedagogically unsound teaching method. The answer that I got was, “then what do you suggest we do with all of these books? We paid so much for them.” Needless to say there is no arguing with that. I wanted to answer, “You can shove them up any orifice you wish” but you see then I would have sounded crazy.

Anyway, I was teaching English and Social Studies and was responsible for giving weekly vocabulary, spelling, writing, reading comprehension and social studies tests. That’s five tests a week for one class. I was also teaching social studies for another grade. On top of all that I had to give daily homework assignments. The English and Social Studies class had 40 students in it while the other Social Studies class had around 20. That means I had to grade 220 tests a week, not including grading homework and classwork.

Now what do you think I did with stacks of handwritten essays and answers to open-ended questions. Do you think that I was decoding reams and reams of horrifically scrawled mind-numbingly boring misspelled landfill waste. Not if I wanted to have a life.

Rather, this is how I ACTUALLY graded all those tests. I had two criteria, aesthetics and reputation. If the paper looked nice and I knew the student wasn’t dumb I gave them an ‘A’. If the paper looked as thought it had been written by a paraplegic panda and the student had the IQ of a head of lettuce he got a generous ‘C’. Really now, could anyone expect any better?

With 220 tests a week, if I spent a measly five minutes grading each of them it would have taken me 18 hours!!! Yes, EIGHTEEN HOURS to grade them all, every week. Did those kids get a quality education? Definitely not! Did my opinion matter that giving all those tests every week was a bad idea? Definitely not! Did stress, sweatshop wages, constant harassment from administrators and insane working hours make this job one that I wanted to keep? Definitely not!