Thursday, March 22, 2007

It's not monday

Yesterday was a public holiday, and now it feels like monday. It was awesome to have a break though! I was EXHAUSTED!

It all started on Monday, with an hour prelab for the Bird Prac (play ominous music), where I had to fight giggles the whole way through. Hearing the lecturer, who is very English and 'well-mannered' (for lack of a better word) say things like 'cock-up' was a bit more than an early morning brain could handle.

The prac itself was a disaster, it should have taken an hour and a half and ended up taking 4 hours. The thing is, it's ordered in stations, with questions at each station and 3 minutes to answer it. The lecturer kept complaining that there wasn't enough time, so we had 8 minute stations, 15 minute stations, half an hour stations...

Then on tuesday, on top of a whole pile of bird pracs to mark, I got my first-years' pracs in my pigeonhole. I also started coming down with flu, and ended up falling asleep over my computer wearing 3 jerseys and shivering. I ran off at lunchtime to see Carla's wedding dress (it's SO stunning! ) and then to see Jo at work and try and make peace. That done (it's all more or less normal, she's doing my nails tomorrow, I'm buying her a carton of cigarettes for her birthday and dying of guilt if she ever gets lung cancer).

After that I went home and collapsed and slept for around 15 hours. At one staeg I got an sms, hear the tone, looked up, fell asleep. Reached for my phone, fell asleep. Realised it wasn't there, fell asleep. Reached on the other side, fell asleep. It took me an hour to find my phone and read the message.

Yesterday, feeling much more human, I went off to my friend Trishya's 21st. It was nice, very relaxed, just sitting around listening to a whole bunch of geology students getting excited about rocks, and one really annoying girl going on andon about rainbows and pink teddy bears and pink hearts...

Eventually I spent about 3 of the 4 hours talking to Lynne, her sister and it was really nice. I haven't talked to her properly since my 12st, which was just under a year ago.

After that I went home and started marking. I got through all the bird pracs (I must post the amusing answers sometime, I made a list. They weren't as funny as usual this time though), and most of the first year pracs. Those were shocking. I have a nice bunch of students, and they all do pretty well, but I think they're getting lazy and put very little effort into it. It's actually an insult to me, that they don't bother with their work and expect me to put hours of my time into marking it and giving them constructive feedback. It's too bad that I'm not going to be there tomorrow, or they would have got SUCH a talking to!

Anyway I must finish my marking now and get back to work.

4 comments:

meva said...

What a week! I hope you feel much better.

And how do you get yourself through the marking? A chocolate biscuit every 5th paper, or what?

Helen said...

Mostly just laughing at the stupid and funny stuff and swearing at the other stupid stuff. It's horrible!

It can be nice too though, like if you really battled to get a student to understand a concept and then they get it right or that sort of thing. Mostly it's a cup of tea every half an hour or so. Tea makes things ok!

Luke said...

There are some of them that cannot be saved by any amount of tea...they are THAT bad!

sarah said...

helen sigh just do experiments on the first years

hone some skills! practice brain transplants!