First marking of the year done

It was day three of term and I finished a batch of marking. It wasn’t really day three for me, of course. Our fieldwork starts two weeks earlier. And the students are expected to keep a field notebook with their notes and results. At the end of the field trip, they hand it in. And then, of course, we need to mark them. This is the only marking on paper I still do. Everything else the students submit electronically.

The thing with marking on paper is that only one person at the time can do it. So every year it is difficult to get this done within the four weeks we officially have for a task like that. So over a week after the field trip, when there still had been no mention of the notebooks, I asked Martin what the situation was. And of course that meant the sleeping dog woke up, and not much later I had a crate full of notebooks in my office.

I knuckled down to make sure I finished quickly! After me, four other people need to get it. I finished it on a late Wednesday afternoon. And Jaco would be next. But he wasn’t in on Thursday, so he wouldn’t start until Friday, almost two weeks after the trip. Oh well! I did my best. It’s out of my hands now! I can go back to more stereotypical activities for the first week of term. Like preparing and recording lectures…