Today I discovered that there are some things I cannot do in the middle of a noisy laundromat, and grading papers is at the top of the list. Exams, however, are another story--I managed to grade an entire set of final exams while moving two loads of laundry from basket to washer to dryer to neatly folded piles. What makes the difference?
The local laundromat is not an ideal environment for doing anything requiring coherent thought--or, really, any kind of thought. I was distracted by the other patrons' masklessness, the noisy machines, and the television up in the corner blaring ad after ad after noisy ad begging listeners to invest in Medicare supplement policies. The ads must work or there wouldn't be so many of them, but I would have appreciated more variety and less fear-mongering.
Grading papers requires a particular type of focused attention that I could not have managed in that environment; after all, how can I follow the nuances of a student's argument when the dryer is beeping for attention and some washed-up two-bit celebrity is trying to sell me a bill of goods on a television with the volume set to Wake The Dead? But this final exam was more fragmentary and eminently interruptable: read a question, make a comment, assign some points; check the dryer, match some socks, fold some towels; read another question, assign some points, and so on until all the exams are folded and the towels have been assigned final grades.
Wait, reverse that.
One class down, three to go--but all the other final exams are timed essays requiring sustained focused attention, so not conducive to laundromat grading. What other household chores lend themselves to multitasking? Grading while cooking? Grading while vacuuming? Wait--we're supposed to start painting rooms this weekend, so maybe I'll try grading while watching paint dry. At least it'll be quieter than grading at the laundromat.
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