A Mountain of Marking Amid a Sea of Education Experts

Hooray it's Friday!! Seven weeks down and only 29 weeks as a teacher left.
Sixth grade has just packed up and left with the assignment to work on a postion paper due Monday on if they think viruses are alive or not. I am packing up thirty 7th grade lab notebooks with 3 weeks of labs to grade and 23 eighth grade lesson plans on a disease they will be teaching about to check at home this weekend. If I can get in a groove, I'll grade one piece of work every 5-6 minutes. That is about 6 hours of marking to do this weekend. Oh yeah, I still have a bimester exam to make for a student I teach math. Marking is certainly an understood part of being a teacher and I believe it is important to turn work around quickly and let kids see that you took time to check if they followed rubrics and applied themselves to an assignment. But I will definitely be happy when it is all behind me.
When I think about the effort I am about to put into my profession this weekend and the rhetoric that flows from non-educators (politicians and special interests) and semi-educators (bureaucrats and adminisrators) about what makes a good teacher or good education, I become very discouraged. After all this marking, returning it Monday, and reviewing the objectives of the assignments, I know the cognitive connections for many of the middle schoolers about what they have intellectually gained from these academic exercises will be minimal and for some nada. Hard to compete with the world of tv, peers, movies, emailing and texting, personal image and popularity, teen-magazines, Justin Bieber, sport, ...
Those who often speak the loudest and longest and most emphatically about what education needs, I feel, are those most in need of a good dose of weekend marking followed by a week in front of a class trying to get across one significant concept. The 'education nation' needs a vaccine against taking themselves too seriously and a shot to cure testing mania.
Fortunately I have not been given (yet) the bizarre set of self-assessment activities that have fallen on the elementary teachers in the school. My wife (3rd grade teacher) has a booklet with questions on the "atmosphere" in her classroom to answer this week. Apparently there are different areas of self-assessment she will be going through as the year progresses.