You, too, can rediscover the joy of marking

It's my experience that almost any unpleasant task can be made less trying by having a special song to sing while doing it.

When I first learned to drive, I really hated the whole process. Until I came up with my Driving Song, which made it so much more fun (and, oddly enough, discouraged pesky passengers). It was sung to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell", and went something like this:

We're all going to die,
We're all going to die,
Hi ho the derry-oh
We're all going to die.

As I lived in Christchurch at the time, which has a road named Kilmore Street, a friend kindly made up an extra verse (to a slightly different tune) for me to use on special occasions:

Kill more people
on Kilmore Street,
la la la la la la la
something something feet.

You can see from this that Unpleasant Task Songs don't exactly have to be works of art. Which is good, as I am not a working artist.

I have, however, composed a special marking song for times of great need, such as this afternoon when I started on the 67 assignments I have to mark by Tuesday. So I thought I'd do the whole internet a favour by posting it here. (Names in this version of the song are fictitious; when I sing it in real life they most certainly are not):

Sarah, Sarah, you write in sparkly pink pen
You dot your "i"s with hearts
I refuse to ever read this again.
Ever.

chorus: Tra la la, tra la la,
You fail, you pass,
Tra la la, tra la la,
I wish you weren't in my class

Jason, Jason, why was yours five days late?
Let me see, could it be?
You have no clue what the point of the exercise was? I hate
You.

repeat chorus

Katie, Katie, there are 79 of you.
Is it too much to ask that
you write down your last name too?
You fail.

repeat chorus

Alan, Alan, you write like a thesaurus
On steriods.
It's a shame that in class you ignore us
so that your paper is contentless crap.

chorus: Tra la la, tra la la,
You fail, you pass,
Tra la la, tra la la,
I wish NONE of you were in my class

Except Mandy, because she worked out the answer to question seven.


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