Marking season

I finished my spring semester marking yesterday. I estimate I've read about half a million words since 19 April. I set a coursework deadline for a week after our dissertation hand-in deadline, so I make it doubly difficult for myself. But it got me thinking...

There is something odd about the spring marking season that I've noticed in the decade I've now been involved with it. The autumn seems incredibly manic - the pile of marking is on top of everything else, and you're getting ready for the next semester. In spring, the sky is blue, the grass and trees are that vivid green of early season. The oyster-catchers screech outside your windows. The whole campus has a warm, soporific air about it as the cherry blossom drifts down into the courtyards.

The corridors are quiet. Doors are shut as people take their piles of exam scripts home, or plough through Turnitin assignments. Every now and then you pass a group of students huddled in a corridor, sharing notes about their upcoming exam, or doing the post-exam debrief. Yet the whole place is hushed and oddly calm. Even Twitter seems quieter. People have nothing to talk about, except their marking. 

Yet there is the stress underlying it all. And this is proper, I have absolutely no power, stress. This stuff has to be marked before the Exam Boards or those students ain't graduating. If you speak to people they have a deadened look on their face from just reading endlessly, or dealing with the administration of the thousands of grades. You end up noticing spelling and grammatical errors in everything you read. Every text gets a mental mark out of 100. You can't think of anything else, but the marking. 

And then it's done.