I woke to strong wind and rain lashing at the window.  Last week the lawn service sprayed the twenty-five-year-old tangle of daffodils, ivy, and pachysandra that has spread out from the central tree into the lawn and gone to weed, but it shows no sign of dying. I suspect that all the rain we've had -- day after day after day of it -- has washed off the herbicide and given the the vegetation a second wind.

In a way it's good that the past ten days or so have not been "Susquehanna Sparklers," days when the air is so clear that the edge of every leaf is visible even across the meadow and light floods my kitchen in the morning and my study in the evening, because I have not been able to enjoy them. Since May 14 I have been working eight hours a day in a large room in the offices of DRC, a company based in Minnesota that has been contracted to process the PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment), the reading, writing, and 'rithmetic tests all of our fifth, eighth, and eleventh graders take.

I took the job because it was temporary and paid well, about $11 an hour, a third of what I made for extra-contractual instructional work when I was employed by a school district. But it's a foot in the door. As a friend said when he told me about the College Board's search for readers for the new SAT writing component, there's hay to be made in the standardized test biz for people like me with skills and experience in evaluating language arts performance.

To my surprise, I don't hate this job. The atmosphere in the reading room is a cross between an academic sweat shop and the coolest study hall you've ever been in. We work in library-type silence from 8:00 or 8:30 (start time is flexible) to 10:15, take a fifteen-minute break, and then work steadily until a half-hour unpaid lunch period at 12:00. The afternoon goes the same, with the day ending at 4, 4:30, or 5:00, depending on how many hours one wishes to work. This is much more concentrated writing evaluation work than I am accustomed to, with little variation. Fortunately we don't have to read for grammar or spelling or elegance of expression. We read only to determine how well the student performed the task. Did he demonstrate an understanding of the brief essay he read? Did he copy, paraphrase, interpret, or extend? Or did he write irrelevant material, indicate a refusal to perform, or merely leave the response space blank? Thus I can read with much greater speed than if I am evaluating and suggesting improvements in a more original essay from an older student. Every day I read 300 to 400 versions of how deciduous trees change through the seasons and then another 300 or 400 predictions of the changes that will occur in a relationship between quarreling neighbors now that they understand each other a little better.

There is a lot of camaraderie despite the long periods of silent reading. To qualify as a reader one needs only sixty credit hours of undergraduate work, not a completed degree. Thus my coworkers consist of other retired educators, an actor who's been on Law & Order and NYPD  and similar shows dozens of times, some recent grads still looking for professional work or waiting for law school to start, and a few youngsters who've just completed their sophomore year. I've fallen into eating lunch with several twenty-somethings whose energy is infectious. One just got his master's degree in elementary grade counseling. He's a crusader for the kind of schooling that turns out happy people instead of overqualified or narrowly-qualified corporate drones. Another is pursuing a degree in philosophy, and one wants to be a history professor. One young woman is a poet in an MFA program, another has been out of school three years but has not yet found a full-time teaching job. All of them are sincere about doing the best they can for Pennsylvania's fifth graders. That helps mitigate my disdain for standardized tests. That and the $1100 I'll net, enough to finance a summer of gallivanting to writing programs.

The long hours have taken a toll on my energy and my other activities. I need long periods of mental prepartion and transition afterward for any creative task. I don't have that now. I've enjoyed many aspects of this experience, but I'll be ready for the last day on Friday.