“Marking is drowning me and changing nothing”

Nobody designed this on purpose. Writing in every book feels like the thorough, caring way to respond, and the habit comes with the job. But by the time your comment reaches a student, the lesson it came from is days behind them, and the class has moved on. The errors in a set of books cluster too: most students need one of the same three or four comments, and you write each one out thirty times. Hours of your evening buy a few seconds of their attention, and nothing in the routine asks them to do anything with what you wrote.

The pattern holds because marking is visible in a way learning is not. A marked set of books proves you have done your job, to yourself and to anyone who opens them, and doing less feels like neglect even when the comments change nothing. The techniques below lighten the load from two directions: some shrink what you collect, so a few minutes of reading tells you what to teach next, and some move your response out of the books and into the lesson, given once to everyone while the work is fresh.