When people ask me why I've never had children, I always say it's because I've has too much marking. It takes up all your free time so there is little opportunity to make yourself available in the romantic marketplace, plus if I ever were to have kids it wouldn't be fair on them because I wouldn't have been able to give them much attention. Now I'm at a career stage where I mainly organise the work of others, so don't find myself doing much classroom teaching any more. But counting each exam answer as a separate item, as well as all the essays, dissertations and practical reports, I have marked around 35,000 things in my working life. That's excluding multiple guess tests and short answer assessments. Far more than any human being should have to mark. Yes, our American cousins seem to require a great deal of talk to accompany their labours, with perpetual meetings, consultations, socialising and then having to go out to dinner with them in the evenings. It's pretty much a full time job being American, so there's precious little time to get any actual work done in my experience.
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