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Except for the ambient street light

20:41 / 02.12.05

Or, Urbanization and its discontents? This time of year, I am deeply aware that mainly I grade undergraduate papers for a living, which leads inexorably to a kind of dim night of the soul. A night of the soul where you stub your toe against a sofa foot, which really hurts more than it ought to, but it's just whining to complain.

This thread arises from trying to teach and always feeling like the semester has somehow disintegrated beneath my fingers by the end. There are students who fall apart, those who gradually disappear...what happened? A few are doing well and striding across the line. Most are just clawing their way to the finish.

Leaves me feeling not despairing, not entirely depressed, just relentlessly vaguely disappointed.

Anyone else want to wallow in mild annoyance?

21:00 / 02.12.05

Now I feel guilty for skipping my spanish class. Lo siento, profesora alas.

21:07 / 02.12.05

I realise that teaching people with a bad attitude to learning must be somewhat disheartening but is it not worth doing the teaching for the few who do stride ahead?

At Undergraduate level the ones who skip classes choose to skip classes as knowing adults and so therefore it's their bad attitude which is at fault. I wouldn't bother wasting my weariness on them if I were you.

21:51 / 02.12.05

I feel for you, alas [/Chaka Khan] but I was lured into this thread by your light pollution reference. Neighbours opposite have installed an insane quantity of Christmas lights in their floor-to-ceiling living room windows. As I sit here tap-tapping away at the laptop, every time I raise my head I am blinded by about fifty bright white lights on an irregular and very annoying flashing cycle, changing pattern continually. I may have to break into their house during the night, dismantle their light show, and bugger their hamster, just for fun. How can they sit about in their living room with that constantly changing windowful of lights flashing? Suirely they'd want to kick their own windows in after an hour or so?

On the subject of work-related misery though. My organisation has invested huge amounts of time and millions in cash in a huge new IT project. I've been sorting out the training end. Big stress and much busyness but I have met all my targets and provided a ridiculous volume of training to get everyone to where they need to be.

But the company responsible for the software have fucked it up totally and my targets are the only ones being met. Everything else is going pearoid. And now I'm whoring myself round the clinical areas, to give support and do probling-solving, and getting endless grief. Those responsible for the fuck-up are never seen in daylight, so I'm the one being shouted and screamed at. Rrrrrrrrrgh.

trouble at bill

13:02 / 03.12.05

hmm, i feel i must respond to this, on account of me also spending all of my time atm grading papers (though not, I might add, making a living doing so as it pays so poorly). I don't feel disappointed though; I'm lucky in that the majority of my students are very good, generally enjoyable company and write rewarding papers. This whole end-of-term marking thing is always an insane mixture of emotions, exacerbated this time by the fact that i've now not had a day off for three weeks, have the whole Xmas thing to worry about and am currently of the opinion that this'll be the last year of undergrad teaching I ever do (simply due to it's complete and utter failure to pay a living wage), which makes it slightly sad. But's all it's going along, that's the main thing. Only six more papers to go, then all I have to worry about is teaching preparation for next week, when I will have to teach a subject which I have never read about, never mind taught, before; sadly, I am increasingly used to that. It's not night here, but it is gloomy and pouring with rain, so I am having a soggy saturday afternon of the soul, I suppose.

14:29 / 03.12.05

Anyone else want to wallow in mild annoyance?

Yes, but even more than that I want to talk about teaching with you. But first I have these draft papers to comment on (not grade, yet: there's a whole nother story, yet to come...)

15:14 / 03.12.05

I was lured into this thread by your light pollution reference.

Oh, good... Because as I was writing it, I was staring at a street lamp outside my office window and ruminating, in a kind of muddled headshoppy way, about whether light pollution has an effect on the profundity of human experience somehow. But I couldn't quite articulate it, so I just left it kind of ghostly. Because I sometimes wonder about the way these seemingly trivial things in our world--e.g., the fact that most of us can't see the stars at night in any proper way any more--affect our psyches.

So I totally sympathize with frustration over insane Xmas light shows, Xoc. I don't live next door to any, and I still want to rip them down just from driving past them.

Deva, I'm actually in the same boat--commenting on term paper drafts before the final grading even really begins. Would love to talk teaching sometime, here or elsewhere...

And, yes Lulabelle, it is best to teach to those who are striding, and they are heartening, but I have an overdeveloped sense of guilt, so I feel vaguely responsible for the failures (and at the same time wondering if I spend too much time fruitlessly trying to coax along the failures so that I'm not doing as much for the strong students as I could). Could I have done something different to reach many more students? Chances are quite good that, nope, nothing would have mattered, but there's always this off chance... And it's less of a rational reaction than a vague emotional state. The dim night of the teacher's soul.

[Here's the schoolmarm response in me: "What are you whining about? You have a good job, you're actually getting paid a living wage for this, which is not the case of everyone trying to do this work in the world (see above!), and, even in a bad term, there are many good sorts who wander into your classroom. Even the fuck-ups are sometimes quite interesting, for all the frustration they can cause. So, for chrissakes, go worry about the AIDS crisis or the Iraq war or something that's causing real grief in the world. Hmmm?"]

Anyway, it was great to see so many responses come in on a Saturday--I was assuming my little thread would be buried.... But you, dear Barbelith, let its ambient light shine....
(Hey, I heard that groan.)

15:46 / 03.12.05

I'm slowly being eased back into teaching after a long time doing only research, so I may be a looking at this through rose tinted glasses...but it isn't that bad, is it? Marking is often tedious, to be sure, and students can be frustrating but academia actually affords you an enormous amount of freedom.

And the odd student you do get through to is well worth the effort, if you ask me, since all that most students want is a qualification that will improve their earning potential - a perfectly understandable goal, and not to be undervalued just because we are the sort of people who think there is something more to what we are saying. So, while I am sympathetic to student needs, I think you have to realise that at some point the choices are theirs to make. I think it is definitely less depressing that way.

16:48 / 03.12.05

Lurid, what you're saying makes perfect sense, and I hope its clear that part of me feels much the same way. I know I'm lucky to be able to do this work. I'm mainly just tired: we've been going since mid August and its been a particularly intense semester for me.

And I do think one other part of my malaise stems from the fact that my institution is going through a bit of a crisis at the moment, due to a lower than expected enrollment, so there's some pressure on us to retain students at all costs. And the class they did recruit seems fairly disparate in their skills: a few who are really strong and some who have trouble stringing words into sentences, and sentences into coherent paragraphs, let alone a research project. Put 20 students in a composition class where the job is not just to evaluate the writing but to make better writers of them, put pressure on the prof. to help them all "succeed" so we can keep taking their tuition money, and...

But, again, enough of my whinging. If someone else wants to wallow in their own unjustified angst, please come join in, and I'll shut up now. Truly, Mi thread es su thread.

trouble at bill

18:16 / 04.12.05

ONLY TWO MORE TO GO!!!

trouble at bill

18:24 / 04.12.05

sorry, that looks either shouty or slightly infantile, i am just having extreme difficulty containing my excitment at the prospect of getting at least some of my life back after 9.00am tomorrow. I would also like to talk about teaching. When I have eaten and slept a little I will start a thread on one aspect thereof which really irked me this time round, namely how one teaches gender to people who do not know that there is such a thing - in less than thirty minutes, but i guess that's probably Head Shop stuff so I'll resist the temptation to go on about it too much here and now.

18:30 / 04.12.05

Ugh, THREE for me.

My school is so cheap they don't want to lose business by being closed for two weeks so we're only closed for one. Ugh.

I know what you mean by feeling like 'you've failed' with the ones you don't seem to have reached. I have this even in EFL teaching. I'm teaching an exam prep class atm and there is only one I'm fairly certain will pass. The rest? Je ne sais pas. One I'm sure will fail miserably. I only meet with them 4 hours weekly, but what could I have done to up their pass rate? Anything?

My general English class I am actually really enjoying. But. it. was. a STRUGGLE!!! with these guys at the beginning! They're quite high-level (proficiency), and so many of them have been in England for a long time, have been attending English classes for a long time and are jaded/bored with the whole EFL class thing. Additionally a lot of teachers are 'scared' of this level because the students are so damn good you really have to be on their toes (I must admit I was scared when I started with them).

I was very frustrated with them at first because whenever I busted my ass preparing a lesson that I knew would challenge them, I got a lot of resistance and a lot of, 'can't we just sit and talk? And you can correct us!' (Uh, NO. Not all the time anyway.) It took me a few months, a couple lessons deliberately planned to show them that they didn't know everything, and the BBC audiobook of 'The 39 Steps' (starring Tom Baker!) to really win them over.

The thing is whatever my students do... I was SO obnoxious when I was in college that I always feel like it's my Karmic justice when they come in late, surreptiously text under the desk or start talking to their buddy (in Portuguese!) rather than listen to me. If I'd had a mobile in college I definitely would've texted under the desk!

20:17 / 04.12.05

I was a good student, mostly (although there was one philosophy class, which actually I really liked, but I was having to do a workstudy job at 5:30 am and was always so sleepy by that time that ...) I am not the center of my students' universe. I am not even the center of their university.

I have 4 more research project drafts to comment on today, one more week of classes (and another of exams)...

[pathos]
Who needs to be penetrated by the light of stars--light that has traveled for thousands of years to arrive at the doorstep of my eyeballs, tonight and tonight only? Street lights are infinitely practical. Why mourn the loss of such a feeble light?
[/pathos]

19:41 / 05.12.05

If it helps, most stars are in turn being blotted out by the light of other, brighter stars that happen to be a little closer to our eyes.

It's all relative.

There's actually an old astronomical paradox based on the idea that night really shouldn't be dark at all. Space is infinite, containing an infinite number of stars, and light never really "runs out" -- it keeps going and going until it transforms into something like heat or electricity.

Q: Why is space dark?

A: Olber's Paradox.

You might enjoy the resolution.

23:29 / 06.12.05

Ok! Pathos solved! Thanks, grant.

(I am, actually, also done grading for the time being, as it happens, which may have more to do with my rising spirits than Olber's Paradox--which is a most ingenious paradox, however...)

Somehow it is comforting to know that darkness is the norm, too: it takes a whole lot of light, viewed straigh on, to seem "bright." So this daylight thing gives us the illusion that being bathed in full on light is "normal" when, really, it's quite an unusual state of existence, universally speaking.

(Still makes me want to blow out the street lamps and zap the garish Christmas displays, though.)