Add Some Joy to Your Paper-Grading Grind This Holiday Season
We writing teachers all have our tools to help us get the grading done, but most of them don’t exactly conjure the holiday spirit. Here are some ideas for ways to stay cozy and at least a little merry in the midst of what can feel like interminable drudgery.
Do something fun with sticky notes. If you don’t find sticky notes inherently pleasurable, skip this one. If you do, stick a sticky note to the wall for every paper you grade. I like doing this with several colors of the little flag sticky notes to make a design. You could do little doodles on your stickies when you have strong feelings about particular papers. Enjoy your increasingly colorful wall (or door or desk or whatever surface you have handy) as a tangible sign of your progress.
Snack rewards. Give yourself a handful of cashews or grapes or whatever your snack of choice is. This one can be dangerous, especially if you have a huge pile of leftover Halloween candy and tend to eat your feelings. But it can be nice, especially if you would otherwise forget to eat because you’re so busy trying to get grades in.
Beverage rewards. Indulge in a pomegranate bubbly water or a mug of Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice tea (please sponsor me). No alcohol until after ALL the grading is done. At least for the day.
Stacking / accelerating rewards: maybe you start with grapes, but once you only have one more section of papers left to grade, you get to break out the Snyder’s Hot Buffalo Pretzels (again, please sponsor me).
Build a spreadsheet where you monetize your grading. Pay yourself a tiny amount of money to spend at the thrift store for every assignment you finish grading, and actually go to the thrift store and buy yourself a sweater after grades are submitted. Make it your office sweater and wear it during next semester’s grading slog to remind yourself of past achievements.
If you can take a laptop to a coffee shop and grade, get some good-spirited fellow teachers to meet you for peppermint mochas and an extended grading time. Be strategic with the invites.
Find an accountability buddy on Reddit. I admit this is kind of weird and is probably not for everyone. But during a particularly desperate semester, I found a random accountability buddy through a Reddit thread designed for this purpose, and my new buddy Tony and I did daily-ish check-ins on Discord for a few weeks while trying to make progress on a few time-limited goals (like meeting minimum quotas for daily grading). There are accountability apps you can pay for, too, but if you plan ahead a little bit and are comfortable messaging strangers from Reddit, you can probably find some other human out there on the Internet who could use the help and will be your buddy for free.
Take crafting breaks. I’m a knitter, and I love to step away from my screen every 4-5 papers to sit somewhere more comfortable (if possible) and work on my knitting project for the length of a Sufjan Stevens song. Bliss.
Take reading breaks. Let yourself read a chapter of a Louise Penny novel after every hour or two of marking papers. This is also dangerous if you don’t have a lot of self-discipline around reading genre fiction.
Pretend you are Dumbledore in The Half-Blood Prince, drinking that horrible potion so that Harry can find a fake horcrux or Michael Jordan playing a Very Important Basketball Game while he has the flu. If they can do it, we can, too. Drag yourself to that finish line.
The throughlines here (except for the last one) are, first, to have something off-screen that reminds you that you have a body, second, to indulge strategically in whatever holiday vibes make you happy as a means of enticing you through the thicket of term papers to the wide open spaces of winter break. Good luck, godspeed, and please let me know if you have ideas for zhuzhing up holiday grading that I can try next year!
