The Sunday problem

Nobody schedules it. It does not appear on a timetable, it is not in anyone’s contract, and no school has ever sent a circular about it. But if you ask a teacher in the week before the half-yearly what they are doing on Sunday, you already know the answer.

This is a post about that, and it is not really about software.

The hours nobody counts

Teaching load is measured in periods. What is not measured is the second job that runs alongside it: setting papers, typing them, formatting them, proofreading them, getting them printed, and then marking them. Three or four times a year that second job stops fitting into the gaps and starts taking weekends.

And the thing that makes it heavy is not difficulty. It is that almost none of it is teaching. Choosing which questions test the chapter well — that is teaching, and it is maybe twenty minutes. The rest is clerical: making the marks add up, keeping the sections the right shape, stopping a diagram landing on the back of a page, remembering to change the exam name in the header.

Clerical work done at eleven at night by someone who taught six periods is where mistakes come from. Not carelessness — arithmetic.

Four things that actually help

1. Separate the thinking from the typing

These are different jobs and they are best done at different times. Decide the shape of the paper — which chapters, how many marks each, where the choice sits — while you are still fresh, on a single sheet of paper, in ten minutes. Do the assembling later. A paper whose structure was decided at 9pm and whose questions were picked at 11pm is a better paper than one where both happened at 11pm.

2. Keep the skeleton, not the paper

When a paper works, write down its structure and file that. Papers cannot be reused — the students have seen them. Structures can be reused for years, and rebuilding one from scratch every term is the most wasteful thing in the whole cycle.

3. Stop the department setting the same paper five times

In a lot of schools, five teachers of the same subject each build their own version of the same unit test, in five separate evenings, from the same chapters. That is four evenings spent producing difference nobody asked for. One shared bank of material, or one person setting and the others reviewing, is not a loss of autonomy; it is four Sundays.

4. Say the quiet part in a staff meeting

The reason this never gets fixed is that it is invisible. It happens at home, individually, after hours, and everyone assumes it is just them being slow. The first school we spoke to that actually reduced it did nothing clever — someone counted the hours out loud in a meeting, and the calendar changed.

What we think a tool should and should not do

We build a question paper generator, so treat the following with appropriate suspicion. But we would rather say it than not:

A tool should take the clerical job — the assembling, the marks arithmetic, the layout, the header, the print format. It should not take the judgement. Which chapters matter, how hard the paper should be, whether this class is ready for that question — that is the part that requires having stood in front of them, and a tool that claims to do it is selling you something.

The right test is not “how fast did it make a paper”. It is how much of the evening did it give back, and did you still recognise the paper as yours. If a teacher ends up proofreading forty invented questions for errors, the evening has not been given back — it has been redecorated.

That is the standard we try to hold ourselves to, and it is why every question in our bank comes from the prescribed textbook and is approved by a person before it can appear. How that works →

If your department is heading into December already tired, the most useful thing in this post is probably not the software. It is item three.