I remember my first year in Shanghai, spending Sunday afternoons hunched over thirty notebooks, marking the same grammar mistakes for the thousandth time. It felt like a rite of passage. A necessary sacrifice. But honestly? It was just a massive waste of life.
The red pen religion
Some teachers think marking every page by hand is a moral duty. If you don't, the kids feel ignored and standards slip. I get it. I used to believe it too.
The tech crowd at the other extreme wants to automate everything. Homework is just retrieval practice, they say. Machines are better at it. Let them handle it.
Both sides are missing the point.
The "personal touch" myth
The pundits love talking about feedback as if it's sacred. They worry AI marking will be "dehumanising." That students need the personal touch.
Easy to say when you're not facing 150 pieces of work every week. They love the symbol of the red pen. They ignore the truth of teacher burnout. A teacher who spends ten hours marking on a Sunday is ten hours less of a parent, a partner, a human being. We're not meant to sacrifice our families to a marking treadmill that a machine could handle.
Marking is mechanical. Let's treat it that way.
Here's what I think: homework is the easiest thing to automate in education. We've mistaken a mechanical task for a pedagogical one. If a machine can tell a student their algebra is wrong, let it. The value of homework isn't red ink on a page. It's the data that tells you what to teach on Monday morning.
When I mark by hand, I get a vague sense of how the class is doing. When AI marks it, I get a dashboard. I can see that 80% of them failed Question 4. That transforms my Monday. Instead of guessing where the gaps are, I can target them properly.
Protecting Sunday lunch
This isn't about being lazy. It's about leverage. Let the machines handle retrieval practice. Reclaim your Sunday afternoon. Hard work matters, but so does your sanity. So does actually having a life outside school.
What I'd do differently
If I were starting again, I'd do three things:
Automate the mechanical stuff. Use platforms for retrieval practice and multiple-choice. Don't waste a single human second on it.
Reinvest the time. Use those ten hours you save for what AI can't do — one-to-one mentoring, planning better lessons, actually talking to your students.
Be honest with parents. The red pen isn't what makes their child's education good. Precision data and more actual teacher time in the classroom are what matter.
You aren't lazy for wanting to automate your marking. You're being professional about where your energy is most useful. Let the machines handle the homework. You handle the humans.