The Kronikle
![Picture](/uploads/1/2/3/8/12382595/3799853.jpg)
Ah, to be among the nerd-tagged, faceless arbiters of hundreds of thousands of teenagers too young to remember Licensed to Ill attempting to pad their future launch into adulthood with a coupla college credits and one less class to muddy up the day.
It is a calling, a tradition, a paying job! One thousand, two hundred educators jump on planes, trains, and automobiles (well, not so much trains) and read. At the aptly named Reading.
Many, many years has seen this tradition repeat with only minor nods to change (none of these changes come readily to mind so maybe not). Poverty-stricken professors and high school teachers who haven’t learned not to care come together in a windowless hangar. They sit in padded chairs in front of tables covered in cheap, white table plastics and sugar. The color-coded folders, the pink booklets, blue room divider curtains and garishly costumed temporary workers culled from the depths of Kentucky’s barely employables provide distraction from the visual monotony. For the most part, the experience is so mechanical, so mediocre, so mundane that it causes one to pause and consider why anyone would agree to prostitute their minds to read the academic equivalents of porn conceived, directed, and executed by meth addicts in the midst of kicking their habits.
There are perks. Never underestimate the value of a change of scenery to fully punctuate the end of a school year. Generally, one’s efforts seem respected by various support staff and one’s ego is sufficiently stroked by the hierarchy. Some individuals participate to serve their profession, or escape their families, or indulge in…indulgences (might be watching a game past bedtime, might be a nuclear brownie, might be record quantities of Red Stripe—or so I’ve heard). The mattresses are pretty comfy. It’s a great vacation for folks whose grandmas taught them that idle hands are the devil’s tools but I am not sure how many of us are out there. More powerfully, it is a group of intelligent people who share interests that the vast majority of people in the teachers’ real lives emphatically are not interested in. The insular, routine, and continually disappointing nature of the work creates a bond that for non-warriors must come close to what marines developed for each other on Guadalcanal, 1942.
Once, I read over 2000 essays in 8 days. That is why students in my class are never, EVER assigned essays.
It is a calling, a tradition, a paying job! One thousand, two hundred educators jump on planes, trains, and automobiles (well, not so much trains) and read. At the aptly named Reading.
Many, many years has seen this tradition repeat with only minor nods to change (none of these changes come readily to mind so maybe not). Poverty-stricken professors and high school teachers who haven’t learned not to care come together in a windowless hangar. They sit in padded chairs in front of tables covered in cheap, white table plastics and sugar. The color-coded folders, the pink booklets, blue room divider curtains and garishly costumed temporary workers culled from the depths of Kentucky’s barely employables provide distraction from the visual monotony. For the most part, the experience is so mechanical, so mediocre, so mundane that it causes one to pause and consider why anyone would agree to prostitute their minds to read the academic equivalents of porn conceived, directed, and executed by meth addicts in the midst of kicking their habits.
There are perks. Never underestimate the value of a change of scenery to fully punctuate the end of a school year. Generally, one’s efforts seem respected by various support staff and one’s ego is sufficiently stroked by the hierarchy. Some individuals participate to serve their profession, or escape their families, or indulge in…indulgences (might be watching a game past bedtime, might be a nuclear brownie, might be record quantities of Red Stripe—or so I’ve heard). The mattresses are pretty comfy. It’s a great vacation for folks whose grandmas taught them that idle hands are the devil’s tools but I am not sure how many of us are out there. More powerfully, it is a group of intelligent people who share interests that the vast majority of people in the teachers’ real lives emphatically are not interested in. The insular, routine, and continually disappointing nature of the work creates a bond that for non-warriors must come close to what marines developed for each other on Guadalcanal, 1942.
Once, I read over 2000 essays in 8 days. That is why students in my class are never, EVER assigned essays.