8.30 am. Several emails had sat, unanswered, in my inbox for too long. Acquitted! Marantz gets a toupee:
There were two further Vocational Practice, small-group tutorial projects to mark. The students have put hearts and minds into their task. Only a year ago, most of them were third year undergraduates. Today, they’re tutors in the making: confident, able to self-evaluate and learn from their experience, and rigorous in their curriculum design. They’ve laboured with love.
A tussle with Turnitin thereafter, with Mozart’s Requiem in the background to remind me of my end, and to prepare thereunto. Bach’s Art of the Fugue oiled a period of dry and perfunctory exam administration until noon. With a warmed pasty in my sandwich box, I walked to the School to attend a markers’ consultation meeting about the MA Research Project submissions.
After the meeting, I returned to exam admin: number crunching, uploading reports, and sifting anomalies:
Thereafter, it was an afternoon of BA and MA inquirers meetings. Some principles and observations derived from today’s encounters:
- Don’t seek to be better than others in your cohort. Rather, seek to be better than you are in the company of others with the same ambition.
- Now is the best time, usually. Indeed, now is the only time you can guarantee.
- Who you are is your greatest asset. What you’ll become may be your greatest surprise.
- Life, for some of us, proceeds along a wiggly line.
During the evening’s practise session, I explored the Zvex Fuzz Factory effector further. Back at my desk, I initiated the most hateful admin task of the year: the annual Research Postgraduate Monitoring Report round. It should be simple, but the constant toing and froing of a document file between the student, their main supervisor and second supervisor, and me by email complicates matters and slows down the process considerably. What’s required to facilitate efficiency is an on-line electronic form that’s visible to all at any time. ‘Some Roxy Music, please!’
Sundown:
We are spoiled by these silent, end-of-day spectacles at this time of the year. ‘Count your blessings, name them one by one’.