tag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209Freckles & DoubtWith my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.Freckles & Doubt2022-02-21T12:26:47Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:994614on an ever spinning wheel, as the images unwind2022-02-21T12:26:47Z2022-02-21T12:26:47Zpublic0oh thank the cosmic wossnames, this third attempt at new glasses actually works, I can both read and see the computer screen. Conversely, distance is now a bit fuzzy, but I suppose I can use the previous, inadequate pair (no close vision, also hurt my nose) for driving and watching movies. Not that I ever watch movies any more. Or drive, very much. Yay, pandemic. Anyway, I thought the poor little optometrist lady was going to weep with joy when I pronounced these ones fit for purpose, I shudder to think how much the two remakes have cost them. They've been very sweet about it. <br /><br />The lens prescription is now fine, but this pair was hurting the hell out of my ears, and it's all been a bit of a revelation: I have never before in my life had a glasses prescription which wasn't correctly made, or frames which were actually uncomfortable to wear. I've always been able to put on a new pair of specs and hie me into the wild blue yonder, rejoicing in vision. Multifocals are, apprently, a bugger. Fortunately the amazing optometrist lady was able to bend the arms into a shape which no longer hurts, so we are now good to go, but really either I've been incredibly lucky with prescriptions for my entire life, or this particular one was jinxed. Probably both. <br /><br />I have been not really posting because the last two weeks have been ungodly and horrible, I worked a 14 hour day last Sunday trying to finish up late reg submissions, I have never seen students so disorganised. On top of the blissful student disregard of deadlines, the already excessive challenges of remote reg in two weeks shorter than we had last year, were sharply exacerbated by, yup, yet again, campus closing down for student protests. About fees, again. I am, however, pleased to report that campus being blockaged and closed down, and lectures being interrupted by an SRC hellbent on preventing the academic year from continuing while any student was denied registration because of fee debt, is a <i>lot</i> less stressful when one is working remotely. Also, technology helps: while the protesters tried to disrupt live online lectures (by singing, in at least one case), a quick round of academics swapping tips on Mute All quickly settled the hash of that particular outbreak. <br /><br />Now it's all gone suspiciously quiet, awaiting, I think, the Council meeting tonight which will decide if some, or all, of the fee blocked students will actually be allowed to register. If no, all hell will probably break loose with further blockades and protests. If yes, all hell will break loose as we suddenly have to register nearly two hundred additional students two weeks into term, using an exhausted advisor cohort, in as short a time as possible, since we're already a week and a half into term. Yay.<br /><br />This has probably been the most exhausting and difficult reg season I've ever experienced, the volume of email I've had to deal with, and the levels of bewilderment and disorganisation of students, have been unparallelled. The legacy, I think, of two years of remote learning, and a growing and horrible detachment from the processes of academia on all levels. Our systems were not designed for this, and have adapted only partially, reluctantly and inadequately.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=994614" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:994269well, that esacalated quickly2022-01-29T13:54:23Z2022-01-29T13:55:08Zpublic1Fun features of Registration Hell Season: three different advisors using the wrong ID to assign student reg submissions to me on the database over a five-day period, so I didn't see them and found them only by accident, hitting me with a merry 30-strong pile to process when I thought I'd cleared my queue. Considering pinpoint retributive laser strikes from orbit. <br /><br />Fun additions to Registration Hell Season: orientation. I have been working 10-12 hour days for several weeks and am very tired and scattered, so discovered only today that the orientation site, which I opened to students on Wednesday, had been released with the benefit of my extremely flawed and distracted fumbling of the degree groups. These were supposed to restrict students to seeing the curriculum material for their own programme only so they don't all sign up for the wrong degrees on the wrong forms, and I managed to screw it up so they don't see any curriculum info at all. Which, aargh. They really need that time to process it before they register. Sorted now, but aargh.<br /><br />Fun additions to Registration/Orientation Hell Season: a mini exam committee in the middle of it, processing all the students who wrote deferred or summer term exams; small board schedule, only 100 or so, but I have to do it over this weekend. I am tired and scattered, see above, and checking them is like pulling teeth. I have sacrificed my last chocolate orange to the cause, and am permitting myself a segment if I check ten records. <br /><br />(It's a slightly weird check, too, we assessed continuously rather than with exams last year, because remote, and it's inflated the marks so the distinctions and Dean's Merit List awards are off the charts. Remote learning and COVID have been very polarising, we have simultaneously the highest fail rate and highest distinction rate we have ever had, selecting, of course, against lower income students who don't have good work conditions or internet access. Yay transformation. And the Law faculty's merit-based access to the Law major has set its admission bar nearly 10% higher than usual because of the marks inflation, and unsuccessful students are exploding furiously all over my inbox. Sigh. It's usually fatal to cross a Law-inclined student, they all fancy themselves lawyers already, and present Arguments.)<br /><br />Fun additions to Registration/Orientation/Exam Committee Hell Season: still no new glasses, and I can't bloody see with these ones, I have to slide them down to the end of my nose to read the tiny board schedule writing, and they keep falling off. Very distracting. <br /><br />On the upside, the weather has remained below 30 so I don't have to make blood sacrifices to the rain gods, which is just as well, I'm too tired to leap naked around a pentagram. And my flame lily is green and leafy and flowering like a mad thing. It's not all bad.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=994269" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:993868the fog of war2022-01-24T10:07:46Z2022-01-25T06:28:40Zpublic2It's Monday, time for a rant list! Things That Have Got Right Up My Nose, and which I require to be blasted by the Cosmic Wossnames forthwith:<br /><br /><ul><li>The weather. 39 degrees on Saturday, 37 yesterday. Today is only supposed to be 26, but my otherwise much appreciated little house tends to trap temperature extremes lovingly and recreate them for the next couple of days, so it's still like a cross between Durban and an inefficient oven cooking meringues up in here. I have adopted my mother's cunning recommendation, which is to waft around the house wrapped in a voluminous cotton scarf which I dip into cold water at approximately hourly intervals. But it melted my chocolate oranges on Saturday. Not cricket. <br /><li>My <i>fucking</i> fancy new bifocals, which do not focus on either the screen or anything for close reading, and moreover hurt my nose. I have had them remade once already (removed prisms, no dice), and am currently wearing the old ones (too weak, scratched to hell) in order to deal with Registration Meltdowns, while the long-suffering optometrists make up a new pair with a new prescription and new frames. We have Ship of Theseused my new specs, in fact. If the new ones don't work I will, recking not the expense, be ordering a brand new pair of office specs, valid reading and computer screen only, and wearing the others, possibly alternately or, like Professor Branestawm, all at once, for distance. Phooey. <br /><li>Student reading comprehension, which is adding new levels of futility and despair to my tech support function, and today presented me with a student offering me a screenshot of the apparently opaque and incomprehensible final registration screen, with a big blue "Submit" button and an instruction to "Click submit to finalise your registration submission", and an innocent query about why their registration has not been finalised. Because, I patiently point out, they have clearly not clicked "Submit". Oh, they say, they didn't realise. Aargh.<br /><li>By the terms of my Ancient Treaty with Scroob, Parcelforce and all its works.</li></li></li></li></ul><br />Things which have mitigated the rant-worthy list, above: the charmingly eccentric spelling tendencies of the student whose registration form specified yesterday, in cheerful all caps, a course called "ATHMORSPHERIC SCIENCE".<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=993868" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:993551uglification, derision, fainting in coils2022-01-21T06:51:21Z2022-01-21T07:58:23Zpublic0Orientation/registration hellseason seems to have leaped out of the gate with considerable verve and velocity this year, I have been working 11-hour days since the start of last week. I am thus currently submerged in the usual sticky and insistent morass of remote registration admin, orientation site design, continuous student queries, advisor solecisms, tech support and fervent wishes for gin. A more than usually infuriating two-punch of student unpleasantnesses yesterday caused me to have to mute my computer, step away from the keyboard and go and play Stardew Valley for an hour to simmer down. (Spend three days patiently explaining the rule behind the "no" I have to give, to increasing petulance and anger, only to have the student go over my head and negate the umpteen emails and hours of typing when the higher-ups promptly fold and grant the concession in the way I've been specifically instructed isn't possible. Twice. Honestly.)<br /><br />However, there are consolations! today has been materially improved by the following.<br />1. An advisor sending me an Instagram capture from one of the university's general student hangouts, which cheerfully states "The devil works overtime. Jessica (plus my surname initial) works harder." Which made me go awwwwwwww. Sometimes they do notice. <br />2. Getting today's Wordle in three goes, possibly as a result of undue fanfic exposure. (You do all know <a href="https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/">Wordle</a>? Simple, brilliant, addictive. It starts my morning remarkably pleasantly on a daily basis for minimal time input. <br />3. Cooler weather for the last few days. Thank heavens. Although tomorrow also projected to be a stinker. I do not enjoy temperatures in excess of 30 degrees. <br />4. The discovery, in the course of digging through the cupboards for more sugar for my tea, of the stash of Terry's chocolate oranges I bought in the post-Christmas price drop zone, and promptly forgot about. <br />5. The further discovery, over the last week, that feeding her Animalax on a daily basis and catnip on a twice-weekly one reduces the level of continuous whinging from Pandora to something a lot more bearable. She seems to be missing Jyn. Or complaining about the heat. Or suffering existential angst. Or resenting the quality or the food service. Or her arthritis is flaring up again. Honestly, who knows, but the above seems to help. <br /><br />I am very tired and very stressed (in retrospect, working straight through the Christmas break to update the orientation site was predicably detrimental to my ability to handle all this), but life is not actually all bad.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=993551" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:993194total perspective vortex2021-12-23T10:21:36Z2021-12-29T09:05:35Zpublic1I am, once again, a very tired thing in the limp chewed string category, it's been a long year, and one very full of emergencies and makeshifts and adaptations, all demanding unlikely quantities of my time and mental energy. It was exam committee season last week; over four days, including the weekend, I individually checked around 1500 student records. (With the added minor challenge that my wildly expensive brand spanky new bifocals weren't working, and wouldn't let me focus on close stuff, to the point where I had to revert to the old specs and send the new ones back for remaking, apparently without the prisms, which are giving me auras and headaches.) And the exclusion review committee meeting, in which we lovingly review every excluded student in the faculty and try to find ways to readmit them without the whole appeal thing, took out half the subsequent weekend, with 7 hours of depressingly disastrous records on Friday and 4 on Saturday morning, so I feel I am somewhat justified in being wiped. <br /><br />I really wanted and needed to be on leave this week to recover, but can't, because results were released to students yesterday, and since 7.30am yesterday I have answered over a hundred desperate student emails panicking about exclusions and failures and insufficient accolades and what have you. About one in 20 of which are genuine errors, and the rest are causing me, in my slightly punch-drunk state, to type up replies which unequivocally deconstruct their attempts to graduate despite a pivotal failed course, while gently crooning to myself, to no fixed tune, "There are ruuuuuules, and they apply to yooooooooou".<br /><br />This is a slightly unhappy, welcome-to-adulthood sucker-punch these poor kids are facing. Most of them wade right in with righteous indignation, insisting that there must be some way around it, it's only one course, can't they do it concurrently with postgrad, or get a rewrite, or a re-mark, or just count up their credits instead of their courses, because Plans next year, and Money, and Aargh. And the answer, unfortunately, is No, because there are Ruuuuuules, and they apply to Yooooooou. And I think the resulting outrage and sense of victimhood is because of two things: (a) their insufficiently developed organs of perspective, which as Just Post-Adolescents they are still develping, so that The End of Their World is still The End of THE World, and how can anyone not see the importance of accommodating them. Compounded by (b), late stage capitalism and consumerism, they are the Customer, there is always a way to accommodate them, they've paid for this, how dare! <br /><br />Which, no. Welcome to the cold hard reality of adulthood, rules still apply. Like, (for everyone except actual billionaires, about whom the less said the better), gravity, and taxes, and speeding fines, and having to go to work in order to eat. And, in fact, having to meet the degree requirements in order to graduate. Adulthood is in many ways amazing, and I wouldn't go back to teenagerhood for anything except an absolute guarantee I could keep my memories and adult perspective and replay it properly like a botched video game run, but sometimes adulthood, in terms of consequences, simply sucks. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it does. <br /><br />And it may be some small consolation that, if adulthood sometimes sucks, at least we are all in this together, no-one is immune. COVID doesn't help in the Adulthood Sucks stakes; my mum hasn't been able to visit for two years, my sister and niece are currently down with it (fortunately very mildly), so Christmas is cancelled. Which is not as dire as it sounds, my family's never been big on festive wossnames, I'm really not much bothered by that aspect. Which is just as well, I have to spend most of the break catching up the orientation prep I haven't had time for, in time for the new academic year and reg season to hit in January. I'll rest when it's all over. Sometime in March. Aargh.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=993194" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:991577things that are amusing me despite the current registration meltdown2021-03-14T11:11:32Z2021-03-19T07:43:20Zpublic0<ul><li>The student in my inbox with the gmail account which calls itself THE INTELLECTUAL PLATFORM.</li><li>The student the other day who thanked me, somewhere in the middle of a 20-email conversation, for my "relentless patience".</li><li>The student who has just emailed me with an absolutely beautiful typo, addressing me as 'Dead Mam'. Why yes, dear student. Yes, I am in fact currently dead. How did you know?</li><li>The fact that we are dealing with online registration processes which entail putting submissions into different stauses, like INCOMPLETE and REVIEWED and ASSIGNED, and I keep getting Laundry Files flashbacks to occult situational codewords. If I put a student into SCORPION STARE status after their fifth illegal duplicate submission, a basilisk ray will erupt from their screen and turn them to stone. </li><li>The emotional kickback to the fact that I have relaxed all self-imposed tea-imbibing restrictions, and am damned well drinking tea, Earl Grey, hot, whenever I feel the need, which is frequently. I was drinking too much and had limited myself to four cups a day, and it's amazing how much the lifting of that feels self-indulgent, and naughty, and luxurious. I will re-restrict when I am no longer working fourteen-hour days.</li><li>The colleague who accused me, in the advisor chat the other day, of being "bergamotted to the eyeballs". He knows me well. I am missing my giant campus meeting mug, which is that one Claire gave me a couple of years back, and which holds about double the usual mug capacity and is inscribed "Fifty shades of Earl Grey". It has become a faculty landmark which causes much amusement in meetings.</li><li>The extent to which load shedding, which seems to be a seasonal thing, we always get it around now, maybe the electricity migrates elsewhere in autumn, has become a relief and a reprieve instead of its usual irritation. If I have no power, I can't work. It's currently the only break I'm getting.</li></ul>Term starts tomorrow, we are doing change of curriculum for another week, with some late registration owing to complete funding meltdowns at the government level. We are about 300 students under usual capacity, which after a COVID year is causing the faculty to wince in financial dread, but they may yet all rush to register late. The wholesale horrors of reg have been energised by the ongoing threat of yet more student protests, which gave me a small but perfectly formed wiggins on Friday when they manifested, but so far have not been major in our neck of the woods. Mostly they're angry at the government, anyway. Which, same. <br /><br />I am Dead Ma'am. I am quite unbelievably exhausted, but it's nearly over. <br /><br /><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=991577" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:991443what DO they teach them in these schools?2021-03-06T15:43:21Z2021-03-06T15:44:03Zpublic1We have nearly finished processing the returning student registrations, which means that currently we are doing the last-minute ones concurrently with orientation and registration for the new students. This is not an auspicious year in which to begin your university career: we are teaching largely online this year, and the remote format is going to give these kids a really shaky start to university learning, and absolutely nothing of the real university experience, which is as much inadvisable friendships, inadvisable drinking and hanging out on the Jammie steps between classes as it is actual academics. Bugger COVID, anyway. <br /><br />Part of my excessive hours over the last few months has been spent cobbling together a virtual version of the usual four-day orientation programme, which has been exhausting and fiddly and at times seems to offer insurmountable obstacles, like the general inability of a large subsection of the student body to read and retain information from anything longer than a tweet. I think we have a comprehensive and largely accessible body of material here; the difficulty is in getting them to actually read it. I need a virtual version of pushing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk, stat.<br /><br />At any rate, the draft registration forms submitted for advisor checking over the last four days have revealed a subset of students who have clearly read, understood and taken to heart, and who offer nearly perfect forms requiring only minor tweaks; and a much larger subset of students who have clearly done none of the above. Exhibits in the second category including such gems as:<br /><ul><li>A long lament about being confused and unable to find the orientation site, to which confusion I can absolutely attest in that said lament is being submitted <i>on</i> the orientation site;<br /><li>A little clutch of submissions on the form for the wrong programme, which is bewildering me because I have the forms very carefully set up so that students can only see or access the ones for their actual programme; I think they must be swapping them with each other, in lieu of the usual orientation week swapping, via the usual teenaged excitable groping, of exotic doses of 'flu from the four corners of the earth; <br /><li>Several submissions which have completely ignored semesterisation, and presented me with a curriculum with seven courses in one semester and one in the other;<br /><li>Those particularly inventively error-ridden forms which have tried to sign themselves up, variously, for English Masters-level courses, or Engineering maths, or a random practical course in tuba;<br /><li>The deliriously indecisive young lady who submitted two forms, one for the BA degree, one for Social Science, including entirely separate and different majors and courses, and left absolutely no indication (a) why the duplicate, or (b) which one she actually wants. I am still puzzling over what she was trying to do. </li></li></li></li></li></ul><br />I mean, I know the info is there. About half the students seem to find it OK, to a greater or lesser extent. Others... don't even try. Some of the kids are all right. Is that enough?<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=991443" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:991054you and your arithmetic, you'll probably go far2021-02-25T14:50:25Z2021-02-25T14:50:25Zpublic0There is a student in my inbox with whom I have had an email exchange lasting (counts them...) NINE emails, during which I have tried patiently and unavailingly to get him to tell me a single, simple fact: what exact curriculum change is he trying to make? He has managed, over the repeated emails, to completely ignore this, sending me cheerful two-line answers in which he variously tells me all the inventively wrong things he has tried to do to make this mysterious thing happen and which haven't worked, and I cannot tell him what the right thing to do is because he WILL NOT TELL ME WHAT THE CHANGE IS! Given that I am sending increasingly annoyed emails with careful caps, underlining and bolds to try and make him focus on the question, I am being left floored and slightly breathless at the magnitude of the reading comprehension fail he is demonstrating. Honestly, he'll never survive a liberal arts degree if he can't read a simple question. And I'm very close to the point, given my current 12-hour days and 300-odd emails daily, of simply not answering any more. Because really.<br /><br />Registration continues to melt down gently, we now have 70% of students having submitted, two days before the deadline, and have processed 65% of those. The proliferation of both reg submissions and queries to my inbox is being echoed, in more concrete terms, in my home environment, by various insectoid and other incursions, which likewise give the impression of scurrying masses imperfectly contained and erroneously misdirected. The cockroach outbreak has, merciful heavens be thanked, been more or less contained by the efforts of the landlord, who replaced the rotted sink backboard (thereby revealing millions of the little fuckers nesting madly in the rotting wood, as I had darkly suspected) and then made merry mayhem with cockroach insecticide all down the skirtings. I have a few desperate stragglers, but they are punch-drunk and staggering, and I dispatch them with extreme prejudice, and the kitchen no longer skitters when I switch on the light suddenly at 2am owing to sleepwalking, weird noises or the sudden need for the loo. <br /><br />The more recent problem is the hitherto flourishing violet I had in a pot in the passage, which suddenly, a week ago, went all lacy-leaved on me instead of its previously happy and stalwart green, and I picked a couple of caterpillars off it, muttered strange gardening oaths, and though nothing more of it. Except the leaves continued to get lacier, and I rooted through them a bit to find more caterpillars, unearthed one or two, and eventually got the hell in and rustled the whole plant vigorously. Upon which there was a sort of squidgy, squirming shower, and about 20 browny-green caterpillars in assorted sizes, from mini to Economy, were left writhing disconsolately on the tiles. I have done that twice more on two subsequent days, to diminishing returns, and I think I may finally have eradicated them all, but really. Butterflies are pretty and all, but there are Limits. <br /><br />Oh wait. 9-email student has just got back to me, via a futile and error-ridden detour through the Law faculty, with the final, grudging admission that he wants to move to Law, and a wild and exaggerately favourable reading of his eligibility for same in terms of school-leaving scores. I have disabused him of his various misconceptions, and am left reeling slightly at the though of the havoc his particular brand of wilful misreading could wreak on the innocent law profession. Lawks. <br /><br />(My subject line is, of course, the Inchworm song, which I know through Danny Kaye on the Muppets, and re-watching the gentle sweetness of which has just soothed a lot of my irritation. <a href="https://youtu.be/Wtk-ZmYlxPA">On Youtube</a>. My caterpillar infestation isn't nearly as cute.)<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=991054" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:990278things I have learned about translating a registration process for 5000 students to remote format2021-02-03T09:10:47Z2021-02-03T14:37:02Zpublic1<ul><li>No matter how organised you are and how much forethought and planning you show, the bulk of your time will be spent waiting for other people to do their necessary bit. <br /><ul><li>Corollary: my Cherished Institution is a particularly slow and inefficient bureaucracy with, at present, really poor leadership, I am beyond tired at negotiating Academic Life Under COVID perpetually on the back foot.</li><li>Further corollary: the remote reg infrastructure has been cobbled together under pressure and inadequately tested, and is buggy as all get-out.</li></ul></li><li>Translating a registration process to remote format is actually about tech support. <br /><ul><li>Corollary: students and academics require approximately the same amount of tech support, and are equally prone to simply not reading instructions.</li><li>Further corollary: tech support people really do say "Have you tried turning it off and on again" before they say anything else. As a reluctant and inadvertent tech support person I have a cut-and-paste paragraph for "Please exit the service request and, when you re-enter, click once and wait rather than clicking multiple times."</li><li>Really annoying corollary: students apparently do not understand folder structures and will email incessantly about not being able to see the file because they have not clicked on the subfolder.</li></ul></li><li>11-hour work days in 7-day work weeks are actually a lot easier when you can do them from home.</li><li>Zelda is very soothing to the soul, even in its current strict one-hour-a-day ration for unwinding purposes, and even though IANACG and am still very bad at the timed and dexterity challenges.</li><li>Teams meetings are still exhausting but are somewhat leavened by the moment's amusement when Pandora is loudly and volubly sick in the background while I'm running training. I am unsure of the etiquette here, Emily Post, I laughed and apologised: should I have rather politely pretended it wasn't happening?</li><li>The three-week period in which I heavily tranquilise myself in order to survive the double gut-punch of orientation and registration is even more essential under remote conditions, consolations of working from home notwithstanding. The gentle muting Trepiline perfoms on my emotional reactions is essential in the not-ripping-heads-off-idiots stakes, and also gives me blissful insomnia-free eight-hour nights when I sleep like the dead. Better living through chemistry.</li><li>COVID has underlined the vague sense reg always gives me: hell I'm good at this. I have wrestled, and am wrestling, these giant unwieldy processes into something like functionality through sheer bloody-mindedness, structural thinking and main force. My parts are going well. The bits out of my control, not so much. It's an impossible job, which makes it take a little longer, is all.</li></ul><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=990278" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:988387a million little nights and days go by2020-12-04T12:52:25Z2020-12-04T17:48:41Zpublic0Student funding application deadline this week, which means my inbox has been flooded with last-minute students needing my advisor signature on their appeals, leading to such student gems as "Do I qualify for the course I want to add?" with no further details. My life is not made measurably better by the need to fire off frequent emails in the genre of "Which course, exactly, do you want to add?" and its ilk. I personally think my patience is commendable, the poor little buggers are all stressed to hell and I mostly manage to refrain from biting them. <br /><br />Work continues to be infested with annoying dictates from On High, all sublimely detached from the realities of actual students or staff. The repetive nature of this is not contributing in any positive way to the rather alarmingly featureless nature of days spent working from home: one day is very like the next, each week is indistinguishable from the previous, time goes very fast and I genuinely lose track of what day it is. Friday today, apparently, which is nice. I could do with a weekend. The last one was either a month and a half ago or yesterday, one or the other.<br /><br />The one interesting thing which has inserted some sort of change into the uniform parade of days is the realisation, a few weeks ago, that the city relaxed water restrictions at the start of November: all the dams are full, we are now allowed to water gardens before 9am or after 6pm with hand-held hoses. Presumably this means we're no longer obliged to restrict showers or put grey water into the loo, but it turns out that a few years of water-saving obsession will hardwire you quite effectively, thank you. I am still saving grey water, it feels deeply wrong not to. It's lovely to be able to wander around the container garden with a hose if I need to, the grey water has never been quite enough to cover it and I used to have to ration carefully and endure the poor plants being a bit thirsty in hot weather, but even if they're gasping I have to quite deliberately overcome the knee-jerk reluctance to turn on the tap. Which is terribly lawful good, and probably not a bad thing.<br /><br />My subject line is, I realise, Magnetic Fields; the phrase has been wandering disconnectedly around my brain all day, without context or identity, and it's been driving me insane. More insane. 2020 is a good year for insanity.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=988387" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:983287Day 87: possibly not actual eels2020-06-17T13:36:05Z2020-06-17T13:36:05Zpublic7My desk chair arrived! choosing, of course, the one single stretch in the 8 hours of the working day when I was actually on a video call, which I suppose is the Cosmic Wossnames for you, but on the upside it wasn't actually a work call, I was catching up illegally with jo&stv on the grounds of, fuck, I worked one 12-hour Friday and one 7-hour Saturday weekend before last, the faculty owes me this. <br /><br />So, desk chair. Not, in fact, eaten by eels en route, although I spent most of Monday and Tuesday darkly suspecting that eels had at least nibbled it, as it was new and spanky and adjustable and, despite frequent fiddling with multiple levers, bloody uncomfortable. Which turned out to simply be my butt and limbs adjusting to a different chair than the one I've sat in for a decade, who knew, because it's fine today. Possibly I'm just getting old. Sigh.<br /><br />It occurs to me that the 12-hour Friday and 7-hour Saturday in fact handily explained my absence from Teh Intarwebs for ten days or so, we had a curriculum change deadline and the Dear Little Students, despite careful announcements and desperate pleas to the contrary, all piled up their submissions on the last day, concentrated in the last two hours before the deadline, leaving me with a hundred or so to process before Monday. I was really quite exhausted for most of last week. I enjoy working with students, really I do, they are bright and interesting and frequently lovely, but just-post-adolescent narcissism and the concomitant lack of development in the organs of perspective make them a little wearing at times. Yes, in the abstract getting the form in twenty minutes before deadline is "in on time", but consider that this faculty contains over five thousand of you, if you all do it at once the system collapses. Sigh.<br /><br />On the upside, @GinevraCat posted on Twitter <a href="https://www.confessionsofafitnessinstructor.com/2019/01/quick-chocolate-lava-cakes/">this</a> recipe for quick chocolate lava cakes, which I have just made myself for lunch, and bugger health food, anyway. Pro tip: it helps to actually include the egg, which I accidentally overlooked, first time round, leaving me with the interesting problem of how to extract the solidified chocolate tar from the bottom of the ramekins, it appears to have fused. I haven't achieved that kind of rookie baking fail since I was approximately a teenager, I have been cackling derisively at myself all afternoon. Good chocolate lava, though. Eventually.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=983287" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:982190Day 68: snowflakes2020-05-29T14:27:38Z2020-05-29T14:28:45Zpublic0ah, Dear Little Students. This afternoon's gem: cannot log onto the student database, because she's forgotten her login details, therefore massive panic about submitting a curriuclum change form by today's deadline. Is emailing me from her university email, which... uses exactly the same username and password as the student database. I have gently pointed this out.<br /><br />The advertised deadline for this curriculum process was 4pm today, which means that for the last 45 minutes my email has been dinging quietly at intervals as last-minute submissions hit the database and it alerts me to the need to go and process them. Yay. <br /><br />I console myself, and hopefully you, with pictorial evidence of Pandora's successful domination of Codsworth.<br /><br /><a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/13605.jpg"><img width="300" src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/13605.jpg" /></a><br /><br />When I was at school I was very fond of the Professor Branestawm books, by Norman Hunter - about an absent-minded inventor with five pairs of spectacles and a tendency to improbable and frequently histrionic inventions. (I cherish in particular the malfunctioning knitting machine which tried to knit a clockwork train. I've always wanted to try). The books had a rather charming line in offbeat and rather slapstick comedy - the earlier editions had illustrations by Heath Robinson. One mad adventure has the professor inventing a baby-burping machine, which runs predictably amok in the children's ward, until the machine is halted in its rampages by a Matron described as "considerably on the large side", who slips in some vitamin ointment and sits down on it, whereupon the machine "gave an agonised squeal, and went flat". I have had, shall we say, those particular phrases revolving gently around my cerebellum since the first time I caught Pandora smugly posed as above. She is also, alas, somewhat on the large size. Perhaps it's fortunate that Codsworth is actually already flat.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=982190" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:979921Day 33: the fundamental interconnectedness of all things2020-04-28T10:14:25Z2020-04-28T10:16:54Zpublic1I am in the throes of remote orientation and remote curriuclum advice simultaneously, which is at the very least preventing boredom. It's also keeping my blood pumping as I patiently answer email queries whose answer was contained in the announcement I have just sent out and which was quoted in the query. Yelling and shaking helpless fists at the sky are cardio, yes? <br /><br />I keep having email exchanges with colleagues where they apologise for a delayed response and refer to the difficulties of working from home in the midst of small children. And every time, I reply to reassure them that I get it, it's fine, I am facing the very different challenge of isolation, and I really think I have it easier than people with young families. Even despite the clear and present danger that not leaving the house for two weeks at a time may lead inexorably into my becoming a crazed, feral hermit, or at least even more of a crazed, feral hermit than I already am under my routine non-epidemic conditions of extreme introversion. <br /><br />But I was thinking about it at 1am yesterday, which is where random insomnia bloody landed me after two hours of sleep: this epidemic may have been enabled by our globe-spanning travel technologies, but its quarantine lockdowns are also enabled by our equally globe-spanning communications tech. I am not alone. I have a high-speed fibre internet line and a cellphone contract. I am in contact with colleagues and students daily, and have check-ins with friends and family via WhatsApp several times a week, plus Skype and Zoom and hangouts, and weekly gin dates with Vi. I have kitties to pet, and with whom to hold conversations out loud, as for instance now, when Pandora has climbed under my desk and is headbutting me lovingly in the calf. <br /><br />And more than that, I am through Tumblr and Twitter and this blog plugged firmly into a global community of experience. I am watching people bake bread and homeschool kids and rant at the government, and lose friends and family to the virus, and exchange jokes and wry insights and mad lockdown self-entertainment memes, and support each other and commiserate, and record sports commentary on their dogs and play videogames as performance art, and deliberately set out to entertain each other and make this whole horrible experience, in some small way, more human and connected and bearable. The manifest iniquities of various governments aside, this epidemic has demonstrated over and over again that at heart the vast majority of humans are communal, and mutually supportive, and pretty decent, really. We make the best of things, for ourselves and each other. We are tanking our own economies and employment by staying home, and we're not only doing it out of love for our fellow humans, we are doing it good-humouredly and creatively and in mutual support. <br /><br />Sometimes I like us. It's nice to know it's possible.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=979921" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:974624small validations, random, various2020-03-04T10:05:15Z2020-03-04T10:08:36Zpublic5<ul><li>My sister texted me from a restaurant last night, where her server noticed the surname on her credit card and asked if she were related to me. Apparently I have massively assisted him in every year of his studies and he is very grateful. I am not sure if this actually compensates for the hell aspects of this helljob, but it's very nice to hear. History does not relate if he brought her free shots on the strength of the association, possibly I actually need to be in the restaurant for that to happen again. <br /><li>The Religious Studies department brought me fancy chocolates this morning. They are trying to drum up numbers in their courses, and I enlivened advisor training this year with, according to onlookers, a heartfelt, impassioned and articulate rationale for advisors to push REL courses on students looking for electives. (This didn't actually do violence to my atheist soul as it's a comparative religion rather than theology department, and made a good case for both the core social science training they offer, and the absolutely vital need to understand religious belief and pressures in today's global political and cultural landscape, which, word. Also, their first-year course back in my undergrad days is materially implicated in the gentle death of the somewhat lukewarm evangelical Christian beliefs with which I arrived at university, so I owe them). They have nearly doubled their first year courses and are seeing marked increases in senior course sign-up, which means I've had a measurable effect even given the hideous 120% of capacity at which this year's first year is labouring. Heh. <br /><li>My small cat, Jyn of legend, song and inoperative jump module, is going through a hyper-affectionate phase, where she will reliably run to the door to meet me when I get back home from work (Pandora merely lurks on top of the piano and waits for me to come to her), and will insist, several times an evening, on climbing onto the desk and headbutting me affectionately in the armpit until I stop petting Stardew Valley ducks and pet her instead. Someone on Teh Internets mentioned the other day that they have never known a cat with the tuck-head-under-human-chin-lovingly impulse who wasn't taken away too early from the mothercat as a kitten, and I have to say, insufficient maternal training would also probably explain the deficient jump module. She still can't climb out of an open window if she has to balance on the windowsill to get up there. I am mentally adding it to the list of reasons to ritually curse her original owners, the bastards who imported her for their visiting grand-daughter and then got rid of her when the child left. <br /><li>In tenuously related news, I finally beat the *()%^@#& Stardew Valley fishing minigame on the Ipad, where I can't mod the hell out of its ridiculously fiddly and demanding butt. I feel that the universe is validating my imminent Ipad upgrade, which has become a necessity because my current iteration's most recent possible operating system upgrade option is too old to run either Firefox or the 1.4 Stardew Valley content update, which is lovely and adds materially to game enjoyment. Bugger Apple's careful operating shenanigans for the obvious marketing ploys they clearly are, anyway. But a tablet of some sort is vital to my reading-fanfic-in-bed routine, as well as to my game-playing needs when I have to elevate my feet because my ankles have swollen again. And I don't want to go Android because I'll have to buy all the apps again for Android. Sigh. Fortunately, I can fund the upgrade almost entirely from the money left over in my account at the end of February, which happens because I'm too bloody busy with reg over Jan and Feb to actually spend any money. On a cosmic level, I have totally earned this.<br /><li>When I mentioned to the Deputy Dean that I'll be on leave for just over a week from tomorrow, he looked momentarily stricken and then muttered, not quite under his breath, "well, that seems overdue". A sentiment with which I can only heartily concur.</li></li></li></li></li></ul><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=974624" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:974130I've been in the dark for so long that I can't see2020-02-21T07:47:58Z2020-02-21T07:47:58Zpublic0Bloody load shedding again, ye gods I hate living in a third world country. I am at the stage where I can tell that the lights are off when I get home by the quality of the alarm system's beep, it's a semitone lower when on battery power than it is when on mains. (I don't actually have perfect pitch, but I have sufficient musical training that I have about a 90% chance of hitting the right note on the piano to replicate one I'm randomly singing. And the alarm beep is by now extremely ingrained after five years in this house).<br /><br />This morning's planned power cut is going to add a new dimension of difficulty to the day's deadline, today being Absolutely Positively The Last Day for late registration or change of curriculum, which means we'll infallibly have a rush of disorganised dilatory students trying to sort their lives out. I have been sending "riot shields and brace!" sorts of messages to my advisor squad, hopefully I am being overly pessimistic. But I don't think so. The combination of Gen Z individualism and just-post-adolescent lack of perspective means that students are extremely likely to assume that a 4pm deadline means that they can arrive at one minute to four and be assisted. The real-life practical implications of a bureaucratic process apparently don't actually occur to them, and obviously advisors and administrators are droids or golems who don't have a home life and can simply stick around until all students are assisted. Bleah.<br /><br />It occurred to me this morning that it's extremely telling that one of my recurring typing blind spots, as in a word I reliably mistype every time I use it, is "curriculum".<br /><br />(Subject line from the Fratellis, "I've been blind", which was playing in the car this morning, and which I shall endeavour not to read as a commentary on my unaccountable continued existence in this bloody job). And now I have to post this quickly before the power goes. Sigh.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=974130" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:972870And so you felt like dropping in and just expect me to be free2020-01-29T04:49:08Z2020-01-29T04:49:08Zpublic1Favourite instance of student narcissism this week: it's 6.30am today, I have come up to campus early (for the sixth day in a row) to catch up with emails. There's one in my box, sent just after midnight, in which the student asks for late registration information, stating, with some indignation, that she emailed the relevant administrator last night but has not received a response, and please sort this out for her, time is running out. She genuinely seemed to expect an instant answer last night, and is annoyed and frustrated that it has not materialised. <br /><br />I realise that this is the response of someone very young who has grown up with cellphones and instant connectivity to her social circle, but it baffles me a little that she's so sheltered she has not worked out the difference between social and institutional contact. Are working hours not a thing any more? Apparently not, given that I'm here at 6.30, after all. Notwithstanding which, she's going to have to make some painful adjustments to the working world, is all I can say. Hopefully my slightly snippy response will help with that.<br /><br />Orientation programme 2 starts today, so hooray for four hours of giving presentations, followed by an afternoon of registration advice, rinse and repeat tomorrow and Friday. I am rapidly approaching the "chewed string" level of exhaustion. But Friday is the peak, it gets easier thereafter, once orientation is over. I will survive. *channels Gloria Gaynor*. Bugger, now I've earwormed myself. Probably you too, she says, fiendishly changing her subject line. Heh.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=972870" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:968697duck and cover2019-01-11T09:11:15Z2019-01-11T09:11:15Zpublic0This is one of my least favourite times of year: it's the deep breath before all the crazy hits. Orientation is the week after next, a week earlier than usual owing to semester scheduling shenanigans from the Powers That Be, and I am frantically finalising orientation and registration material and logistics while simultaneously fending off almost continuous emails and phone calls from panicky students and, worse, their parents, who absolutely have to see me, only me, in advance of registration to assuage their panic. (Spoiler: they almost universally don't actually have to see me. I have a no-you-don't cut and paste paragraph for emails which I am employing vindictively and with extreme prejudice.)<br /><br />I hate this time because of the continuous, niggling, inescapable sensation that there's stuff I haven't done yet which is urgent and vital and it'll All Fall Down if I don't. If I operate true to form I'll almost certainly line up all the necessary ducks with military precision in time for Big Giant Events to run smoothly, but the fact that said waterfowl are not yet all locked down assaults me on the astral plane. I am not sleeping well, and having my characteristic recurring dreams about missing vital objects which are leading me to bumble somnambulistically around my bedroom at night, fumbling blindly with cats and cupboards and bedside tables trying to find them. Since they have been, in order over the last three nights, a massively valuable emerald ring, the heavily barded horse for that jousting tourney, and the documents required for my departure into space, there is no actual way I will ever find them, so I seem doomed to sleepwalk fruitlessly until further notice. Or, at least, until the Big Giant Event actually begins, at which point my stress levels, weirdly, go sharply down, as if I haven't done it there's no real point in worrying about it. <br /><br />On the upside, the undergrad admin office appears to have reconstituted itself as an engaged and functional entity in most particulars, so I hope this will be a Better Year than last year. Oh god it has to be.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=968697" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:955758there's a quiver up her backbone, dogs in the dust2017-12-04T08:31:37Z2017-12-04T08:31:37Zpublic0Things that make me homicidal: having a student arriving in my ofice to add a summer term course to her record. Telling her she is too late to do so, the deadline was Friday and she's effectively missed a quarter of the course. Having her become visibly grumpy and petulant when her sob story about being too busy doing other things to add it earlier does not magically dissolve the rule and allow her to add the course. Having her leave my office in a huff. <br /><br />Two minutes later, receiving a phone call from one of my advising team, because the student has gone straight upstairs to the other advisor's office and given her the whole spiel, as though I have not just categorically told her that what she wants is against the rules and not permitted. She didn't like the answer I gave her, so she went to find another advisor who would give her a better one. It's exactly like kids playing one parent off against the other. Parents among you, does that also make you homicidal? I'm surprised by the strength of my reaction. I really, really don't like being manipulated. Nor does my Lawful Good appreciate the blatant disrespect to rules and processes which that particular manipulation represents.<br /><br />In more amusing news, my previous post managed to completely horrify my mother, who misread the unprovoked starling attack as an unprovoked attack by a student, and was all up in arms and protective about it. I promise that I have not been whapped upside the head by any students lately, or in fact ever, and would definitely be less blasé about it if I had. But it's an index to the Troubled Times On Campus that it was not entirely outside the bounds of possibility that some such manifestation might occur. Fortunately exams are over and the gazelles have mostly fled campus in their usual quivering herds, so I think the odds of bodily violence are greatly reduced. <br /><br />My subject line is the Fratellis, who are my current go-to energetic rock band for things like cooking and driving, although they tend to make me drive slightly ferally. The song is "She's not gone yet but she's leaving", which I am taking as my work anthem.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=955758" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:954711How I Failed Ethics2017-11-13T13:40:10Z2017-11-13T13:40:10Zpublic3Oh, joy, 'tis the season, fa-la-la-la-la. Not, in fact, the thrice-dratted Xmas season, although of course it is, and promptly with the dawning of November supermarkets have blossomed forth in all the usual seasonally-inappropriate merry snow imagery in the midst of African summer, glitzy Northern Hemispherical Christmas trees, and the usual quotient of bad syrupy R&B covers of hackneyed Christmas carols given additional terror by the robotic brassiness of autotune. (How Much I Hate Auto-Tune, a rant in 56 parts. I'm saving it.) <br /><br />No, the season to which I refer is exam season. Lectures ended on Friday, exams start on Wednesday, and the 5 student consultations I've held in the last three hours are all logged in my logbook with "fail fear" in the "Notes" column. They're all about to fail some or all of their courses this semester. This will variously prevent them from graduating, lose them their funding or doom them to academic exclusion. I have patiently strategised a variety of responses with a variety of desperate students whose affect ranges from fatalistic through resolved to extravagantly miserable. Three of them were in tears. <br /><br />To the various individual woes (mostly anxiety/depression with a side order of death in the family) is added the very general woe of, yet again, student protests. Some lecture disruptions last week, lectures suspended for a couple of days. The bulk of our departments have thrown up their hands and given up on lectures in the last two weeks of term, electing to examine an incomplete syllabus. (Some of them, cunningly predicting just this, front-loaded their syllabus and devoted the last two weeks to revision, thus neatly dodging the protest upshot). We are supposed to have delivered the rest of the semester by "blended learning", which is the VC's favourite buzzword and which is frequently deployed in a talismanic sense which utterly disregards the realities of the situation, viz. a proportion of academics utterly unable to deliver it to a proportion of students utterly unable to access it owing to a failure of both skills and technological infrastructure.<br /><br />But the crowning glory is the tent. The protesters are apparently hell-bent on disrupting exams. They spent chunks of last week disrupting tests as well as lectures. Security in riot gear, with shields, have been lurking in rows outside the main exam venue all last week. The VC's somewhat bizarre response to the exam disruption threat, which he has implemented apparently in the teeth of disagreement from the entire senior leadership group and the council of Deans, has been to hire a large tent, which has been constructed on the rugby fields, and in which all exams will take place in a "controlled" environment. I think the idea is to use the rugby fields because you can completely surround and cordon off the tent, although quite why you can't do that to the Sports Centre is not entirely apparent. The Sports Centre, at least, has solid brick walls. Threats to burn down the tent apparently popped up on Twitter within an hour or two of the relevant press release.<br /><br />Last night's usual Sunday dinner featured three denizens of my Cherished Institution, and we ended up rather drunkenly strategising ways to burn down the damned tent, now, ourselves, before protesters do it on Wednesday when exams start. The plan involved layers of diversion and archers with fire arrows, probably deployed from the roof of the nearest res. Its advantage is that the conflagration will happen when there aren't actually any students in the tent, because frankly we're beginning to worry that escalating protests are going to inevitably lead to grievous bodily harm and/or actual death. And you have to ask yourself: at which point in all this management fuckwittery does your own dutiful attempt to comply with management's more deranged directives actually become complicity? At which point do you simply refuse to take part? If a student is badly injured and you told them they should go to the exam, are you in some way responsible? It's not a happy thought.<br /><br />My subject line is the title of my third-favourite track on the new Magnetic Fields album.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=954711" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:954448all fun and games until someone loses an eye2017-11-01T09:41:26Z2017-11-01T09:43:48Zpublic0Well, that was odd. I've just had the Protester Ringleader in my office again, to make the course drop we discussed a few weeks back. It was a weirdly cordial interchange, where he apologised for disrupting my lecture and assured me it was just politics, nothing personal. And that he does not in any way endorse the bus-burning and throwing-things-at-Vice-Chancellors activities of the 2016 protesters, and doesn't agree with the violence, and won't resort to it himself. And was strangely accepting of my argument that, well, I didn't know that when he was threatening my students with a fire extinguisher, did I, and yes, he understands why contextually that would be problematical and result in tension and migraines on my part. <br /><br />We even laughed about it, and agreed that fuck Jacob Zuma anyway, it's all his fault. And had a fairly open and respectful discussion on Ringleader's actual grievances, which are apparently about his reading of the enforcement of faculty rules (in this case, DP for a particular course) as being unfair to poor/black students. And we agreed to disagree on the rules interpretation issue, because from where I sit we do our damndest to enforce rules even-handedly, even if it doesn't feel like it to him. <br /><br />Weirdly cordial. And my neck is all in knots and I can feel the headache building, and I'm shaking very slightly. This campus is inducing PTSD.<br /><br />On the upside, Jo (ty) has finally succeeded in ejecting her overdue offspring, who is a beautiful girl-child rejoicing in the name of Theodora. Huzzah for additions to the small thundering herds in my immediate social vicinity, at least in the abstract. I love the name. It's always been one of my favourites, it's both unusual and strangely dignified. Mad congrats to all three.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=954448" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:954354happy times2017-10-31T10:17:57Z2017-10-31T10:17:57Zpublic0So, the SA government, bless its cotton socks, has announced, perfectly predictably after much backing and filling, that free tertiary education is not viable, and radical student movements are seething. We lost two days from last week with protesting crowds prowling the campus with sticks, and lectures have been suspended yesterday and today. The Management of our Cherished Institution has decreed that lectures resume tomorrow, with increased security presence and an interdict on illegal protests, and the campus staff, bruised and slightly numb, can only brace themselves in expectation. In our court: the new SRC, just elected, rejoices in a majority of Democratic Alliance-identifying student leaders, hell bent on keeping campus open. Against us: interdicts and opening have infallibly in the past provided just the venue protesters need to rampage with maximum effect. I am not, shall we say, sanguine. I think it's highly likely we'll be delivering another truncated semester, and we'll be bloody lucky if we manage, in the teeth of the odds, to run undisrupted exams.<br /><br />In all of this the faculty office is having an outbreak of management fuckwittery, coupled with serious bad timing: the faculty manager has taken two weeks off in what seems to be something of a snit, after trying unavailingly to banish the whole admin office to middle campus, and the deputy has two kids in hospital after a car accident and is likewise absent. There is something of a blitz mentality among my colleagues: keep your heads down, keep calm, carry on. Hope it doesn't explode. <br /><br />I am playing a shitload of Fallout 4 again, because cynical apocalyptic black humour seems a viable response under the circumstances, and I significantly lack the emotional energy for anything other than a retreat into videogaming. In particular, I am deeply enamoured of the soundtrack, which gives you, via an in-game radio station, a truly lovely succession of songs from the 40s and 50s. These are beautifully and somewhat evilly chosen to fit into the post-nuclear-war black humour of the game, and mine the hell out of the 40s genre of novelty songs, hence "Uranium Rock" and "Atom Bomb Baby" and "Craw Out Through The Fallout". They also use sad love songs ("End of the World", "I don't want to set the world on fire", "Into each life some rain must fall") capable of reinterpretation in light of wandering the raider-ridden gun-toting post-apocalyptic landscape (and I have to say, the way in which a lot of these songs mix up love/sex/death/explosion metaphors is ... deeply disturbing, "Butcher Pete" and "Rocket 69" oh my god). And they sprinkle the playlist with syrupy feel-good croonings such as my subject line (also "Accentuate the positive" and "Dear hearts and gentle people") which you are obliged to read severely in the inverted position, wincing. I have downloaded two soundtracks and a bunch of individual songs from ITunes and am playing them on rotation in the car, chortling. It's helping.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=954354" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:952655curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias2017-10-03T08:15:28Z2017-10-03T08:15:28Zpublic3I have just had my second English lecture shut down by student protesters, right in the middle of a particularly pithy bit about postcolonial readings of <b>Frankenstein</b>. We were deconstructing a white British nineteenth-century novel in terms of its representation of marginalised racial identities, what the hell more do the protesters want? I did a quick poll of the class, revealing an overwhelming majority in favour of continuing the lecture, so I tried, possibly foolishly, to continue lecturing over the slogan-chanting and light-flicking. This endured for another few minutes, but narked the little buggers enough that one of them hauled out a fire extinguisher and threatened the front rows, at which point I decided discretion was the better part of valour and shut down the lecture. <br /><br />I am seething. The ringleader was the little shit whose curriculum woes I spent half an hour patiently deconstructing last week. I'm buggered if I'm doing that again, I think I'm within my rights to refuse further advice sessions on the grounds of the threatened violence. I am surprisingly shaken by the whole thing, actually. Tea is helping. As is the revelation via the class poll that the protesters' popular support has eroded to the point of almost non-existence. That mandate, I do not think you have it in the way you think you have.<br /><br />My subject line is, of course, Douglas Adams: the only thing going through the mind of a plummeting bowl of petunias is, of course, "Not again...". If this is heralding a new round of shut-downs... aargh, is all I can say. Aaaargh.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=952655" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:951868you think your youth a permanent truth2017-09-21T10:18:53Z2017-09-21T10:18:53Zpublic0I am apparently at a stage in my personal and professional development where I can, calmly and quietly, spent the better part of half an hour gently talking down the angry student protest leader who has come into my office to discuss his options in dropping a course. Not that he was overtly angry, it's more a sort of subliminal, simmering rage and outrage, but even with no voices raised and no overt threats I am still shaking gently in a startled-deer-trembling-in-the-bushes sort of manner, and it's half an hour after his departure. There is something a little troubling about presenting the rules as they apply to a particular curriculum decision, and being told flatly that he will not accept that, the rule is unfair to black students and will therefore be ignored. Also, that if the VC's office doesn't rule favourable on a particular outstanding issue tangentially related to the query, said angry student protest leader will be referring it back to the student body for action. I suppose I misspoke when I said there were no overt threats, actually. <br /><br />The problem wasn't even the anger and denial of the rules, really. The problem was the half hour, which was the length of time it took me to get into his head the actual implications of the request he was making. It's as if the political bubble insulates him so absolutely from the world (or at least from the ideologically suspect upper echelons of the illegitimate institution) that the actual logic of the response can't permeate. I am also by this stage very good at reining in my somewhat characteristic high-speed polysyllabic babble, and I don't think it was me. It's just that my explanations were occurring in counterpoint to the polyphonic political debate going on in his own head. <br /><br />I am very tired and have a headache, but he left enlightened and actually smiling, so score one for me. My subject line is from the Magnetic Fields, "I Die", but I promise it's not at that stage yet.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=951868" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:951325shit my students say2017-08-18T12:06:33Z2017-08-18T14:05:30Zpublic3Things that students have said in emails to me today:<br /><br />"Dear. Please could you..." (I assume they meant to type my name after "Dear" and forgot, but it's rather sweet like this.)<br /><br />"Goof morning!" (Followed by somewhat of a silly question, so possibly this was actually the correct designation for the day).<br /><br />Things that my students have said to me in person today:<br /><br />"I'll tell my personal assistant to set up a reminder to follow up on Wednesday." (he did, in fact, have a personal assistant. In tow. Kids these days...)<br /><br />This week I have been croaked at by three different laryngitis sufferers and snuffled at by at least one phlegmy parent, so I am expecting lurgis incoming on my hapless form in the near future. I have scored one bar of chocolate, one bag of jellybeans, and tearful gratitude from three different students, which set against only one twenty-minute dissociated rant and blame session from an angry parent, actually puts me ahead. The jellybeans gave me a weird moment of dislocated nostalgia in that they tasted exactly like the little pink chalky cylindrical sweets we used to get as kids, which five minutes of illicit googling suggest were actually Romantics cachous, although I remember them as having an elephant on the wrapper - that might have been a mutant Zimbabwean version. They tasted dusty and pink, I have a very vivid memory of the flavour.<br /><br />I am beyond dead, but it's Friday. I have not to date eviscerated any students or myself. It could be worse.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=951325" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:950094baby got back2017-06-01T13:04:36Z2017-06-09T13:27:32Zpublic0A Dear Little Student just delivered the perfect backhanded compliment: "I've always found my interactions with you perfectly smooth and easy," he says, "you're nothing like the nightmare everyone says you are." Um, thanks. I think. In fact, the vast majority of interactions I have with students are smooth and easy, it's a tiny minority who transgress my boundaries and get snarled at, or who run their heads against an unyielding rule and blame the messenger. It is an index to the extent to which this year's reg process broke something in me that I'm not even particularly hurt by the idea that everyone thinks I'm a nightmare. (a) Actually it's not true, I know I'm rather kind to the vast majority of them, and (b) frankly, who cares what they think. <br /><br />I have compounded my last post's Coming Out As A Soon To Be Ex Academic by telling a colleague, in strict confidence, that I am Soon To Be An Ex Academic and thus can't teach in his course next semester, so the whole thing is reifying at speed. (Dreamwidth wots not "reify", illiterate little thing. It should, it's a good word). This is causing me a small but perfectly formed identity crisis, manifesting as anxiety, avoidance, self-loathing and a well-formed tendency to play a fuckload of <b>Dishonored</b> with bloody-minded pacifism (I finished the main game last night with a perfect no-kill run) while rejoicing in the excessive and Victorianesque politico-Gothic gloom of its setting. So my apologies to anyone who has kindly sent me career suggestions to which I have not responded because I am wibbling like a jelly. I'll get there when I've talked myself into slightly more solidity. I really am very grateful. <br /><br />I feel that the jelly-like identity crisis will be materially assisted by the fact that I am buggering off into the winelands with the Dread jo&stv this weekend for purposes of staying in an Airbnb for two nights, the better to concentratedly wineroute and dine out at Franschoek's many fine dining establishments, which we tend not to have experienced in our culinary meanderings because no-one wants to drive back to Cape Town drunk and overfed. This will be extremely restoring to the soul, and I can only hope that Jyn will not unleash her usual high-velocity sprint for the traffic flow when the cat-sitter opens the front door on Saturday. I'm getting really good at grabbing her one-handed as she goes past, but I've had a lot of practice.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=950094" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments