Why is grading so difficult For ADHD teachers?
Grading can be especially difficult for ADHD teachers because it asks for sustained attention on repetitive work with very little immediate reward, and there is rarely a clear moment when you are supposed to begin. Once the work starts piling up, the task gets harder to enter, and the shame about being behind can make starting even worse.
You can be good at teaching and still be terrible at getting through a stack of essays. I know because I have spent most of my career being both.
There were years when I kept thinking grading was the part of the job I would eventually figure out. I would get more disciplined, build a better system, stop procrastinating, become one of those teachers who hands papers back three days later. It never quite happened that way.
What actually changes the answer
The pile gets bigger while you are avoiding it.
This was always the worst part for me. If I ignore one email, there is still one email tomorrow. If I ignore grading for three days, another class may have handed something in by then, and now the first stack is late too.
At that point I am not just grading. I am grading while thinking about the fact that I am behind, wondering whether students are annoyed, knowing I should have started earlier, and doing the math on everything else waiting for me. That extra layer can make a pretty ordinary stack feel impossible to touch.
People will tell you to do a few papers every night, which is perfectly reasonable advice. I have also carried thirty essays into my house, put them on the kitchen table, walked past them all evening, and carried them back to school untouched the next morning. Knowing the reasonable thing to do has never guaranteed that I can make myself start it.
After a while, the papers blur together.
I teach English, so I can care a great deal about student writing and still reach essay twenty-seven and realize I have read the same paragraph three times.
The students all answered the same prompt. They are often making versions of the same mistakes. By the time I am deep into a class set, I am trying to give the last student the same attention I gave the first student, while my brain has become deeply uninterested in ever seeing that prompt again.
There is no productivity hack that makes paper eighty-four feel new.
Grading also gives me very little back while I am doing it.
The classroom does. Somebody gets something. Somebody says something hilarious. A discussion takes a turn I did not expect. A student who has been quiet for two weeks suddenly has an opinion about a character and will not let it go.
Grading is quieter. You finish one paper and there is another paper underneath it.
And sometimes I created the mess before the papers ever existed.
For years I would assign a five-page essay to five classes of thirty students because that sounded like the assignment I ought to give.
Then 150 essays arrived.
That is 750 pages of student writing before I have written a single comment.
Somehow I never thought very hard about that number when I was planning the assignment. I thought about it when the papers were stacked on my desk and I wanted to cry.
What most advice misses
For about ten years, I had a box of ungraded essays in my car every spring. Not figuratively. There was an actual box sitting there.
I would carry it out of school on Friday because I was absolutely going to finish everything over the weekend. In my head I could see the whole thing: Saturday morning, coffee, music, big clean table, several focused hours, grades entered by Sunday night.
This fantasy survived an impressive number of years considering that it almost never happened.
Usually I graded a handful of papers, got distracted, felt bad that I had gotten distracted, and spent the rest of the weekend avoiding both the essays and the fact that I was avoiding them.
Sometimes I took the box to a coffee shop because apparently the problem was geography. I would order something, get the papers out, arrange my pens, read a few essays, answer an email, check something on my phone, stare out the window for a while, and eventually pack everything back up.
Then Monday came and the box went back to school with me.
There is a funny version of that story now. It was not especially funny when I was living it.
Kids waited too long for feedback. I rushed comments because the end of the quarter was suddenly close. There were grades I gave faster than I should have because a deadline finally created enough urgency for me to move.
I hated that about myself.
For a long time I treated it as evidence that I was failing at a basic part of being a teacher. Other people seemed to keep up. I could teach a class I was proud of and then look at the stack on my desk and feel like none of that counted.
Eventually I had to stop waiting for discipline to solve it.
The biggest change was not a planner or an app. I started assigning work I could actually grade.
I shortened essays. I stopped commenting on every problem I saw. I made a rubric with a few things I genuinely cared about, and I started using time during the school day whenever I could instead of saving everything for home.
Ten minutes while students were writing turned out to be more useful to me than the imaginary four-hour block I kept planning for Saturday.
I also had to admit that students were not reading most of the long comments I was writing. That one hurt because I had spent years telling myself that all of that feedback was what a serious English teacher did.
Sometimes they looked at the grade and shoved the paper into a backpack.
So now I try to give them feedback they can use while they still remember the assignment, instead of beautiful feedback three weeks after they stopped caring about it.
I can actually sustain that.
What to do next
Do the math before you assign the work.
I wish someone had made me do this when I started teaching.
Take the number of students and multiply it by the number of minutes you realistically spend on one paper. Not the fantasy number. The real one.
If you have 150 students and each paper takes seven minutes, you just assigned yourself seventeen and a half hours of grading.
The assignment may still be worth it. Sometimes it is. But I want to know I am taking on seventeen hours before the papers land on my desk.
Make the grading job smaller than “grading.”
“Catch up on grading” is not a task I know how to start.
Five papers is.
Ten minutes is.
One class set is.
I do better when I can see where something ends.
Use the school day when you can.
Some of my best grading happens while students are doing independent work. I am already in teacher mode, there is enough noise around me to keep me awake, and I am not sitting at home at 9:30 trying to convince myself that I suddenly want to read thirty essays.
It is not always possible, and I am not pretending every classroom gives you that time. But when I can take ten papers off the pile before I leave the building, I do.
Write less.
This was hard for me because I am an English teacher and apparently have opinions about every sentence anyone has ever written.
I used to leave enormous amounts of feedback. Then I realized I was spending fifteen minutes on a paper a student might look at for thirty seconds.
Now I mark the things the rubric says matter. I leave a useful comment when there is something useful to say. If half the class has the same problem, I teach it to the class instead of handwriting the same explanation thirty times.
Do not make yourself face every late stack at once.
When I get badly behind, looking at all of it together makes me less likely to begin.
So I pull out one class. That is the pile.
The others can exist somewhere else for the next hour.
This is not some elegant productivity system. It just makes the amount of failure I am staring at smaller, which sometimes is enough to let me start.
What I wish someone had told me sooner
Grading is hard for me. After all these years, I do not think that is going to magically stop being true.
I also know I am a good teacher.
I can teach the hell out of a novel. I can hear a kid make one strange connection in the back of the room and turn it into the best discussion we have all week. I can sit beside a student who thinks they cannot write and find the sentence that proves they already can.
I can also avoid a stack of essays until I am embarrassed to look at it.
It took me a long time to stop believing that one of those facts had to cancel out the other.
It does not mean the grading does not matter. Students deserve their work back. They deserve feedback while they can still use it. I still have to do this part of the job.
I just finally stopped building the entire system around the assumption that someday I would become a person who finds grading easy.
That person has had twenty years to show up.
I am done waiting for him.
Related Overbrained guide
Your First Year Teaching High School While Neurodivergent
Teaching does not end when students leave the room. The book gets into grading, planning, email, paperwork, sensory load, executive function, and the work that keeps expanding after the final bell.
KEEP GOING
The grading pile is one kind of overload. The school day keeps creating others.
Read How Neurodivergent Teachers Can Recover Between Classes? for small ways to reset before the next group walks through the door.
Explore Teaching for more tools and guides for neurodivergent educators.
From the Collective
Andre W. is a high school English teacher with ADHD who teaches about 150 students across five sections. He contributed this piece after years of taking unfinished grading home, bringing it back untouched, and promising himself that the next weekend would somehow be different.
