Why This Is Hell

The last week or two has been a death march - plans of daily reading and viewing took second place to marking and second marking, and I've been trying to finish for ages. But the late essays had issues that needed checking - although they weren't in the end all problems after all - and there were some waifs and strays of late hand ins which we awaited more in hope than anticipation. It's the sort of period that for every two you mark, another one is found to take their place.

And then you start moving the pile from work, to home, to the coffee bar, to home, to work, to the pub, to home, to the cinema, hoping you'll find that stray twenty minutes before you realise you need Google to mark with.

The end stays out of reach.

Today I think I did it - the horror essay from January, the two last first year problems. And there was a new lecture to deliver today. Is that it?

I have lost two Saturdays and two or three other days to sleep - perhaps a sign of running on empty, perhaps a result of too many 2.30 bedtimes, too many, let's mark just one mores...

And just around the corner, study leave, but am I ready for that? It that not sprinting onto a motorway?

I had a grand plan of getting the Gold Megarider, and spending a week on buses, dropping in on local towns. But I have a year-end interview. And I need to see a PhD student in London. And Easter buggers the buses. I need four days of the seven to make it worthwhile. Can it be done?

And then the realisation of the two long term extensions, the essays due in April...

The death march never ends...

There was a plan - for lo! we do not do things randomly round here. But the trip to London on Friday was more exhausting than planned - or perhaps the journey home was - and thus the Saturday morning writing a lecture in the library turned into hitting the radio button on the alarm clock every seventy minutes or so. I emerged at four from bed (I did hear the play with Nighy and Glenister), and turned my hand to the lecture at about seven, and tried for an early night.

Sunday was meant to be about marking the delinquents and seeing a film - but I failed to lie in so started a big tidy in the morning before going to the campus on the hill. Except their coffee bar doesn't open until forty minutes before the film, and I didn't get the marking started, though sorted the essay questions for one module at last.

And so back home to add pictures to the lectures, and mark - but somehow I saved the version cut down to notes over the version I'd started adding pictures to. Fortunately I sent a copy to my co-teachers and retrieved this - so now I have to phone home and then mark. I don't think I'm getting Return of the Jedi watched tonight as planned.

Today's highlight was noticing that a student had written down the manufacturer of my Tshirt. I is kewl.

Apparently.

Aside from that I have the grumpiness which comes from shifting around too many bits of paper and marking, and taking stuff to and from work without them getting more marked. Into this, slot a period of peripetititiary, and decisions about what I can risk marking in trasit.


Time is squeezed.

For someone's convenience I was to meet to hand marking across on a particular day - now they want to move that forward, but that was the day I planned to do the marking on. Take it home now to bring back to do on Monday? Students are chaffing for work back. They can wait. The self-scanner took ten minutes to issue my library books. Don't get me started on Boots/Tescos.

Fifty small pieces of reach are being torn up.

And if your bookshop have several large signs telling me to leave my bag at the till, why are you looking so surprised when I do?


But at least I have a paper and a print out of a paper. A plug converter. And bought a battery charger after weeks months of not doing so (I do have two somewhere already). And bit and pieces of food for a train journey.


Sometimes, I am seven:

Then you get the essay which is stuffed to the gills with quotations - indeed you plan to made a note of some of them yourself for future reference (but probably won't get round to it). The referencing system is a little to pot, but still, there's the festure in that direction.

Alas, the essay is 2,500 words, but only about 150 of them are by the student. The rest is quotation. Each paragraph is a quotation, with an occasional comment by the student. And then a paragraph at the end claiming to have prven something when in fact I've just been shown the evidence at random.

A fail, I fear. A hardworking student, but did the wrong job. *Sigh*

I have watched the end of Herbie Fully-Loaded

I have bought a packet of chocolate hobnobs.

The packet is half gone.

"John Carpenter was well known for scouring his films."

(I thought that was Stan Brakhage)


"As the music climaxes, the cameras cut to a sandy dessert."

H'mmm. Banana Split. Apple Pie.

( Wait for it... )