No second chance exams; fieldwork instead

Almost a month ago I blogged about taking on the Supplementary Assessment Week, as my colleague who normally does that is dealing with family issues. But the School runs in mysterious ways, and it took a month before I heard back from management. And to my surprise, everything happened differently. Someone else was taking over the supplementary assessments, and instead I was asked to organise the fieldwork in early autumn. I have organised it once before, when it was still done in the south, and when the colleague who normally organises it was on parental leave. And it is slightly daunting; it is already mid to late June, people might vanish on holidays and such (even this year such a thing exists), and it is difficult to get everyone together to organise things. Furthermore, used to run on decades of experience; this year we are going to a new location, and we need to do everything from scratch. And we will still be working under restrictions, as the Delta variant doesn't look likely to be leaving us alone by then. And to make it even worse; we are doing this without driving force Suzie. And we don't know when the man with the family issues will be back and contributing. So we will have to ponder all sorts of things; will we be able to put students on small boats? Where will we take a sediment core? Who do we ask permission for doing that? Who can process CTD measurements in Matlab? Who is going to organise the surveying? Et cetera et cetera. So it will be a challenge but we'll make it work!