Towards the end-of-April, George was handed a small pile of unmarked homework by a colleague. George recognised them immediately - he had spent an hour searching for these sheets in November, but they had remained lost; apparently they had been accidentally stacked in with a pile of his colleagues photo-copying. Even though the homework was five months old, George took the sheets home that night and marked them. He knew he couldn't sleep unless he handed the work back to his students.
Now... George is a fictional character, but this account describes pretty well exactly what happened to me one year; and... I must confess that I binned the homework immediately. The decision was entirely logical: out-of-context, any marks or comments would have meant little to these students, and I had a pile of more important work to do. The thing is: I felt awful, as if caught in the act of randomly defacing student's precious work, and betraying the principles of my profession. I retrieved the homework guiltily and embarked on a ten-minute soul-search to make absolutely sure that I was doing the right thing. No doubt about it: if I marked it and gave it back to the students, then they would doubtless bin it anyway; they had other things on their minds, as did I. So, still feeling a little sheepish, I discarded the old homework again, and this time, I let it stay in the bin.