Teaching: more and more piling up

I knew I would have to give a lot of lectures. It would be a lot of work, but I was resigned. And MSc projects and practicals and field days were predicted too. And that was quite enough already! Although th esheer number of MSc projects I had to come up with and in what detail I had to elaborate on them were a bit of a shock. But I had underestimated the amount of work that would pop out of nowhere. Having to come up with a list of articles the students have to choose from, to give a presentation about. That would also mean: pretty much knowing them by heart in order to be able to judge the students, and being there when the presentations would be given. And I didn't expect to get an email informing me I had three MSc tutees. And I didn't expect James coming into my office, telling me he had been given many more MSc theses to mark than he had expected, and if he could offload a few onto me? And then there were the timetabling clashes, meaning I would have to assist with the same practical twice, in order to let all the students participate.

In one way I found I was lucky; nobody had told me that for my glaciology lectures, more hours had been timetabled than I had lectures, and I hadn't bothered to check if the numbers matched. This excess tiumetabling is in order to allow for attendance of conferences or project meetings of that kind of thing. Excellent! First of all: this allows me to indeed attend a project meeting without having a problem with my teaching, but it also means some of the lectures in my diary won't happen. Even the students won't like that as much as I do! I almost have all of the lectures of that series made. And with a few lectures not existing, I might have delivered them all before the time comes I have to start marking all the student essays, field reports, IPCC assignments and whatnot! And that's good; these days I pretty much work at all waking hours except Thursday nights (and the time it takes to do grocery shopping, cooking, eating, laundry and some three short runs per week) and I fear the moment more comes onto my plate. When to do that? There goes the running, underground exploration, and sleeping! Cooking won't help much; my biggest cooking talent is speed... Anyway; watch this space to see how I cope!

 

What my lectures look like, except for the beard