Grading.

Why is grading so awful? I mean, I generally like teaching students, I enjoy interacting with them in office hours, I like listening to their interpretations of certain ideas and correcting them, etc. So why do I hate to grade their papers so much? The phenomenon is not new with me. A professor of mine once told me that going insane while grading is merely part of the territory. It's apparently impossible to avoid. Why? WHY WHY WHY WHY?

I suppose grading is a lot of mental effort on stuff that you might not think is particularly edifying; I mean, if I'm going to spend a lot of time reading a paper, it's generally best if that paper's going to teach me something I didn't know already, give me an interesting take on something, etc. But, then again, having philosophical discussions is no small effort, and I like to talk to students all the time about material. Ugh. And it's not like it's merely repetitive activity all the time; there is a very large variety of ideas in the prompts I allow students to write on.

Well, what we know for sure is that grading is awful. It's the worst torture. Maybe I just don't know why.