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Mighty Slayer of the Possums
Jul. 31st, 2007 10:10 pm( Cut for Blood-thirstiness )
In other ramblings: Tuesdays are a bit of a nightmare. I have 5 hours non-stop from 10-3. Craftily, one of these hours is my office hour, which pretty much guarantees I have 60 minutes in which to prepare for all tutorials and catch up on other office stuff. Which doesn't mean that I wouldn't be glad to see students then. So my day goes lecture:officehour:tutorial:Latinreadinggroup:tutorial. This involves a fair bit of running round campus, so by 3pm I am had it.
And then there's this rant about students changing courses. I know they need to, when they discover that whatever they've taken isn't what they were wanting. But why wait until the END of the second week to do so? And why do you then not turn up to the first lecture of the third week? That's over 1/6 of the course missed!!
I know this doesn't make much of a difference when it's a Lit course - reading the books is often more useful than attending the lectures, provided you read the books! But for Old English, we're teaching a LANGUAGE, at a ridiculously fast rate. Anyone who starts now has missed out on: a)history of the time and place; b)nouns; c)pronouns; and d)verbs. All of which are rather vital to being able to understand the language.
There must be some way we can have the course marked "can change before end of second week with convenor's approval". That way we could see how willing and able the student is, and suggest other courses if they would be better for the student. Because once the second week is gone, you have to pay $100 dollars to change. And these people who have randomly decided they'd like to study a strange dead language without ever checking out the course are now stuck.
GGRRRRRR!!!!! Arrgghh!!
In other ramblings: Tuesdays are a bit of a nightmare. I have 5 hours non-stop from 10-3. Craftily, one of these hours is my office hour, which pretty much guarantees I have 60 minutes in which to prepare for all tutorials and catch up on other office stuff. Which doesn't mean that I wouldn't be glad to see students then. So my day goes lecture:officehour:tutorial:Latinreadinggroup:tutorial. This involves a fair bit of running round campus, so by 3pm I am had it.
And then there's this rant about students changing courses. I know they need to, when they discover that whatever they've taken isn't what they were wanting. But why wait until the END of the second week to do so? And why do you then not turn up to the first lecture of the third week? That's over 1/6 of the course missed!!
I know this doesn't make much of a difference when it's a Lit course - reading the books is often more useful than attending the lectures, provided you read the books! But for Old English, we're teaching a LANGUAGE, at a ridiculously fast rate. Anyone who starts now has missed out on: a)history of the time and place; b)nouns; c)pronouns; and d)verbs. All of which are rather vital to being able to understand the language.
There must be some way we can have the course marked "can change before end of second week with convenor's approval". That way we could see how willing and able the student is, and suggest other courses if they would be better for the student. Because once the second week is gone, you have to pay $100 dollars to change. And these people who have randomly decided they'd like to study a strange dead language without ever checking out the course are now stuck.
GGRRRRRR!!!!! Arrgghh!!
