It’s been a long, hard term and a break from teaching is welcome even by those of us who genuinely enjoy it. I think the students need a rest too! However, those friends and family outside academia often mistake our breaks from teaching as actual holiday, thinking that I, for example, get three weeks off at Christmas. NO! This is not true, here are some of the things I’ll be working on during my so-called holiday…
Archive for December, 2008
End of term: phew!
Monday, December 15th, 2008Why did we want to be academics again?
Monday, December 8th, 2008It’s a really tough part of the term: many lecturers and students are feeling fatigued and/or sick and Christmas is just around the corner. So perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the most interesting articles in Chronicle this week is a rather pessimistic account of three second-year tenure track professors (the equivalent of the second year of a permanent job) and their lost dreams disappearing under mountains of admin work!
Marking: it’s that time of year again
Monday, December 1st, 2008Anyone who is doing an undergraduate degree will probably be quite stressed at the moment because it seems as though the assessed work submission deadlines are coming thick and fast, but spare a thought for us lecturers too. We are the ones working just as hard marking all this work the students are submitting, and it’s not as easy as it first sounds.
