While grading papers at a coffeehouse and emailing back and forth with my best friend and fellow math teacher, “The Swam,” we had the following exchange:

Me:  “There’s an article to be written about how much teachers typically hate grading.  Why don’t I look at grading with genuine eagerness, considering this my opportunity to coach and refine my students, rather than a usually painful, avoided-at-all-costs add-on ‘requirement’ of my job that takes away from the part of my job that I actually love?”

The Swam:  “That’s a silly article.  Grading sucks because in an ideal world we wouldn’t take papers away from our instruction, we’d do all the reciprocal assessment we needed in conversation with our students.  Grading papers is the result of a broken system.  Do you think Socrates sat around coffeehouses grading papers?”

The Swam has a point.  A good point, in fact.  In so many ways we are so many mutations down the line of brokenness in this thing we still call “education” that we miss the point when we try to “do the wrong thing better,” or at least with a better attitude.  Perhaps the appropriate analogy is trying to figure out how better (and more joyfully) to use a hammer to cut a board in half, when all the while we have forgotten about the saw we’re supposed to be painting a wall (see, I did it again).