It’s Friday, finally, though at this specific moment there isn’t really much to cheer about. My Friday schedule consists of a one hour lesson at eight in the morning and then zilch till CCA from three to five, which leaves me a gap of seven hours of… nothing. Of course I can and should use this time to prepare my lessons for next week, get this week’s marking done, etc. etc. But I don’t know, I look at the two piles of observational drawings in front of me and I just don’t feel like marking them. People always think marking art is a piece of cake with whipped cream and a cherry on top… well, they be mistaken. You look at a drawing, refer to your rubrics… oh yes, her use of contour lines is excellent, surely an ‘A’, but her shading doesn’t really have any depth, which puts her at a ‘C’… except at this corner of course, where the shadow under the whatever really gives the drawing a sense of three-dimensionality… there are so many things to juggle when you’re marking an artwork. And the rubrics aren’t carved in stone either. One scores a ‘B’ in every criterion and thus is given an equivalent grade; another scores ‘C’s in almost all criteria, but overall, somehow, you KNOW the latter is a better work than the former…

Giving feedback is tough as well since you can’t or at least it isn’t very nice to circle in red the areas of the drawing you think can be improved. Sometimes the reason why a piece of work doesn’t work can’t even be properly articulated in words… it’s just… “out”. But the toughest part about marking, though, is that once you begin marking the first drawing, you have to, have to, have to, mark the rest of the thirty pieces, because you’re in the zone, and you can’t leave the zone and then come back, because the new zone isn’t the old one, and you’ll ending up marking some works according to one standard and others according to another… If you’re gonna start marking, you’d better be damn sure you have the next three hours to spare, and the energy to sustain yourself till you’ve marked the very last piece…

And of course no one has the freaking energy to sustain himself through three hours of marking art! After work number 12, you get tired, you get cranky, and you get sloppy and hand out marks and feedback arbitrarily, rendering them as good as useless to the students (“shading can be improved”), or, you get cranky and blunt, curt and just plain mean… (“shading is near non-existent and shows no sense of how to create form through value.”) So do I mark now? Plan lessons? That’s another cookie to break one’s teeth on… but never mind. I’m gonna grab a bite, pretend to work by reading an ACADEMIC book like T J Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism for research (I have Don DeLillo’s Libra in my backpack...) and then make a decision at noon.