Categories: random, phd, teaching
Tags: stress, haircut, essays, Romanian, languages
Date: 26 October 2005 15:56:38
ferijen is right, I am indeed learning three languages (Romanian, Russian and Glaswegian). Mostly I'm getting by just fine with the 1st and 3rd (let's not talk about the second - an hour and a half of genitive singular today, argh). My favourite aspect of Glaswegian though has to be whenever I hear kids in the street or on the bus, particularly toddlers - listening to them using the broadest accent imaginable is the cutest thing!
Weird language quirk of the week: I discovered that I have been saying the word for 'forty' in Romanian incorrectly for the last 11 years. I used to have it right, but then when I lived in Romania when I was English teaching I went into a local shop to get some worksheets photocopied (the school didn't have anything as sophisticated as a photocopier), and when I asked for 40 copies the woman looked at me like I'd just asked to meet the Queen or photocopy my bottom or something. She got me to write down the number I wanted, and then told me what I should have said. So I've been using that word ever since, but then used it in my Romanian lesson this week and my teacher looked blankly at me and corrected me to the word I had used in the first place. The woman in the shop is probably still laughing at me now.
In other news I had the great (not) news that I have to mark Level 1 essays. When I took on this position they had only told me about facilitating the tutorials, and then when I got here last month they mentioned something in passing about marking 'some' of the essays (remember, this is in a subject that I've never studied before and have no prior academic knowledge of). Today I discovered I get the whole bloody lot - that is, around 90-odd essays twice a year. The first lot are due in at the end of this term, and have to be marked by mid-January. So I'm going to have a really great Christmas and New Year. Gah. Just what I need at the same time as moving house.
My blog entries are going through a bit of a moany stage I think. That's not good. So as a bit of light relief, when I get home I shall have to regale you instead with my thoughts having just finished "What the Bible really teaches: a challenge for Fundamentalists". It's got me spending way too much time contemplating universalism and morality and all that sort of stuff as well as some of the more and less helpful aspects of my early church experience (that is, experience of church in my early Christian days, not my experience of the Early Church - I'm not quite that old). Or maybe I'll watch Wallace and Gromit or play Pass the Pigs instead.
All of this is just procrastination really though. I'm still plucking up the courage to make an appointment at the hairdressers. Can you imagine - I get stressed out when my hair's being cut by a stylist I know well and know is good, what on earth am I going to be like with a total stranger? I think I'd sooner go to the dentist.