We have two questions we answer in this project. There are tens of thousands of each question to answer. We are finished with one, and we are now tackling the other.
When I started with this company, we had a project where we had an array of seven questions to answer. I was part of a huge room; half of us took three, the other half took three, and we all shared on a seventh. (I think that in the four years I was there, this was the case, number of questions the same.) That means that we had four questions tens of thousands of kids would answer to, and we would have almost a month to get through them all. I think I'm good at my job, but it gets tedious. And yet, if I recall correctly, the room boss (soon to be my boss, period) decided that the best way to get through the entire project was to switch off -- during the course of the day we would go from one question to the other.
That strategy was entirely by necessity; there were some kids whose answers were more important to go through than others, and since those answers were scattered among all seven questions, we had no choice but to do all seven questions until those much-needed answers were graded by us. But by doing that, I think we were kept on our toes. And that's a good thing. We didn't get bogged down on question to the point of eye-rolling boredom. We may have needed a quick refresher on what to look for whenever we switched, but this was something new to look forward to as we went through our day.
It has been said that it's best to just work on one question until it's done. Honestly, if she had her druthers, my boss on the very first project would have done it that way, too. The argument that concentrating on one keeps you laser-focused on what types of things to look for, which makes your grading more accurate, however, feels like a canard to me. I don't get familiar with seeing hundreds of answers to the same question hour after hour; I get bored. I lose focus. I kind of get cranky.
My room boss for this project last year switched off. I think. We switched off early in the project this year. However, for the past two weeks, we concentrated. It took us almost a week to go through and eliminate one question. We are now about two-thirds of the way through the other, and we have been told we have to be done by Sun ... uh, Monday.
Can't come soon enough. First of all, for some damn reason I have been forced into another assignment. There was some work for me for a few days next week, but instead I am starting a new project (or an old project I started at the Mall Of America ... oh, who the hell knows) Monday. Maybe I shouldn't care. But we've been at this same damn question for three days now, and we have expended up to 13 hours of each day in order to complete it. I still feel kind of unmoored over how to score each kid's essay correctly, but I can tell you that I'm not getting any sharper with repeated "practice." In fact, I might be getting worse. Damn kids don't know how to write an essay. They don't even know how to answer the question they're supposed to answer. I am frequently lost as to how low the scores should be. And I ask myself that question time and time again, hour upon hour, for (if you include the other question) about a fortnight now.
But there is one other drawback to working on just one question. It has to do with the end of the project. All that stands between us and the end of work (well, at least until this new project begins -- this may no longer be a worry, but I still want to ruminate on this point) is this single question. There are many stacks of papers until that end, but they all look the same. So we have one single, straight line to this project's oblivion, a destination we can clearly, well, laser-focus on without too much effort. And when you can see clearly what type of question (question singular) is left to be done, when the amount of those questions really doesn't matter ... well, you can see the end from pretty far away. And ever since we switched over on Tuesday, I've been counting down the days until this project's end ... and my need to find more work.
We would not have really had this problem if we had two questions left to do. Not only do I think we'd be fresher and be more excited to jump from one query to the other and back, I think I at least would get the impression that there is a lot of stuff left to be done. So, if we had the same amount of papers left to do now, but split between both questions, well, it'd feel like we're plenty busy. And that makes me concentrate on the fact that we would have a lot left to do, not what is left to do. I think it's a big difference.
But no, we did one, then the other, and it doesn't really matter because we may or may not get done this weekend, and that doesn't matter because I'm getting overtime, and it really, really doesn't matter because I bounce to a new project (however long it is, have no clue) after the weekend. Still sad, though.
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