A Mountain of Paperwork
I make an annual trek each year up a mountain of paperwork.
My wife teaches American Sign Language at a local high school, and each year she gives an “expressive and receptive” test. In this test, each student must try to describe an object to their classmates while the rest of the class attempts to locate this object from a collection of pictures. Each student is assessed on receptive accuracy in identifying the correct objects described by others, and expressive accuracy, or how well everyone else did when the assessed student was doing the describing.
Easier said than done. The paperwork necessary to compute receptive accuracy is simple, because each student has a sheet of paper with all the answers listed by the name of the describer. But the inverse computation of expressive accuracy is tough. For the last three years, this has been something I’ve done to help out.
Computing the expressive score required a full pass through every sheet for each answer. That’s N squared page turns where N is the number of students in class. Then consider that there are 2 items for each student, 2 classes of about 17 students each (luckily there were several absent). That’s almost 1200 page turns!
Actually, this is the first time I computed that number. Holy cow! That’s just one test.
I could have done better for page turning. For example, if I replaced the all-paper method with a complete data-entry based approach. Here I only look at each sheet once and type all the answers into a spreadsheet. Then the computations are simple enough spreadsheet manipulations. I’ve done it that way in previous years. But this year I couldn’t face that data entry again, so I thought I’d try the page-turning method described above. Comparing the two in retrospect, I must admit that I think both methods suck equally.
Despite the drudgery of this task every way I’ve tried it, I have found it to be strangely fulfilling each time. Perhaps it’s because it provides a concrete understanding of what I do as a programmer. Or perhaps it’s because it reminds me of how valuable it is that in my job I help to avoid exactly this sort of pointless paperwork. Or maybe it’s just like climbing a mountain, and the reward is just to be there at the end. After 1200 page turns, or 8,800 meters, or whatever.
Has anyone else had such an experience? Or am I simply deranged?