Affecting, not Correcting

     Last week I was talking with an English instructor, and he mentioned one of his least favorite aspects to the job, having a seemingly endless pile of  "too many papers to correct."  We talked for a bit about ideas to help reduce that load he carries, such  having students read drafts and provide feedback to each other as part of the writing process.  I also mentioned that he can encourage  and guide students to use tools such as Grammarly,  https://www.grammarly.com/, Google's Language Tool, both of which go beyond just spell checking, before they turn their papers in, to reduce the amount of correcting that needed to be done. He had done none of these things, and nodded distractedly, and afterwards I felt that my message had not been loud enough. Or perhaps he was unable to hear due to the mental din created by being completely resigned to a lifestyle of correcting papers every weekend.