Tags: stress, essays, tutorials, PhD, teaching
Date: 28 October 2005 13:19:41
During this morning's tutorial I became aware of the fact that my trainers smell Very Bad Indeed. I hadn't even taken them off, I was still wearing them. Of course, curling my feet up under the chair to hide them made all the difference in taking the smell away. Lovely.
Still feeling cheesed off* about the essay marking. I finally got to formally meet the Prof of the Department yesterday, he's an absolutely lovely, gentle man, and he was clearly very grateful that my position had been created and that I am taking on the Level 1 essays. In fact, he told me that when he had heard I was going to do all the essay-marking he had thought that Christmas had come. I nearly cried. My Christmas (and the next 3 after that) are well and truly screwed because of this. He said that in previous years the lecturers had discussed marking each others' essay questions but had decided that as they didn't know so much about each others' subjects that was a bad idea, and he also said that sometimes he gets as many as 40 essays and how tough that is. So what do they do - give me twice as many when I don't know anything about any of their subjects, and have Christmas off. Gah. I know it will be really good experience for my CV and all the rest of it (that 'good' just got typoed as 'ogod', which is probably more apt), but it's just overwhelming - I want to start getting my head round my own research (which I still feel I'm not working hard enough at or have enough time for), plus once I've moved house I need to sort out getting some nursing work to ease the financial strain. I really really want to get a life, but it's just not happening :(
Yesterday I met a couple of students who have changed to our course so will start coming to the tutorials. One of them was really anxious that she hadn't got History A'level and thought that might be a disadvantage. She looked relieved when I told her I didn't have a history background at all - I thought better though of telling her my only qualification was when I got History O'level 20 years ago, mostly because it can't really have been 20 years ago, surely - I'm so not that old.
* considerable understatement