Spacing Out At Work

I do not want to sound ungrateful.  I respect my job scoring tests, I really do.  But in the past couple years I have found it more and more difficult to focus on scoring these tests, to the point where I routinely think about something for minutes before I snap myself out of it and realize I have a new paper in front of me.

I've been doing this a lot for this project.  My problem, maybe, is that I feel like I need to read each paper from top to bottom, then look at it as a whole, in order to assess it correctly.  That takes a lot of time.  And frankly, not a lot of them are that good.  Sure, they're kids, but I think I have become less tolerant of trying to pay attention to a way a child writes.  I think I have always been a bit bothered by trying to get into the head space of a kid in order to grade him or her correctly, but this time around it has been downright frustrating, if not maddening.

I really do wonder if all this daydreaming has damaged my production to the point where it hurts my standing with the company.  While it's been a chore (and trust me, I'm not the only one whose eyes have rolled into his or her head during our time doing this), I would certainly tough it out if someone took me aside and said that I wasn't pulling my weight.  The last thing I need is to lose my job because I'm bored out of my skull.  Of course, that doesn't eliminate the fact that I indeed am bored out of my skull at work.

What really frightens me, though, is that I didn't space out as much, or as like this, when I started out.  You know, the other day one of my colleagues, one who has known me for a while, said that I score really fast.  I'm afraid that's not true.  I've looked over my numbers, and again, even though no one has pulled me aside and cracked the whip on me, I am average, maybe below average, compared to the rest of the group.  We get statistics of our production all the time, and in the past couple years I look at my numbers and I certainly am not leading.  In fact I have lagged at one or two projects.  I don't know if this change within the past couple years is because I can't take test scoring anymore or if there's something wrong in my head.  If it's the latter, that would really scare me.