Answer sheets

Correcting examination papers is like solving the same question paper 40 times (the number of students you have). It is like improvising on every answer each time and evaluating yourself till the last paper. Like how a musician would keep doing till he could sustain the speed. Like music, it has its own highs and lows - a point where you suddenly start writing "YES" or "NO!" on the sheets of students! Its hallucinating - since it takes you back to the exam hall. If you know the students, it feels that they are speaking off the answers to you! In the mind, you keep nudging - "no, just a bit more, a bit less"...It makes you do aha if all what is expected is there...a strange kind of confidence that arises in you. Checking a well written / well answered paper is delightful, since it reassures you of your knowledge, that you shared with the students.

And there are mercies with borderline cases, where you question your own morals, but give in to an assumed larger interest of the time of the student, hoping that eventually all will be well. No one goes beyond, to check what ever happened to the border line cases. In the pragmatics of the world, all pass. They make their means, sometimes, even without the (academic) examinations.

And with cases of either extreme, you end up feeling disgusted or silly and just end it with a shrug. How do you build up that reasonable amount of interest such that a ward is just able to manage and pass...it's not that difficult.

But sometimes, (since I am so much into reading and research at this point of time), I get into unnecessary and unrequired semantics of language, which I myself reconsider and reevaluate again....