helen-louise's journal

You're not supposed to have favourite students, but show me a teacher who doesn't. On the most basic level, it's difficult not to prefer a student who is always on time, hands work in promptly, smiles and works to the best of their ability over a student who is late with everything, lazy, surly and has pitiful excuses about why something didn't get done. In working with students one-to-one, no matter how much you try to hide it, you each learn about the other's personality. And often what you learn over time isn't the same as the first impression.

My favourite student of this academic year has her exams on Monday and Tuesday next week, and it has been an uphill struggle. Not least of all because I've had to spend far more time than I'd like unteaching some of the rubbish that her college teacher has been telling her. I'm at the point where I'm starting to doubt that this person even has a chemistry degree. If you're in the middle of a lesson and you ask your teacher a question about what they're teaching, shouldn't they be able to answer it? Maybe not immediately - we all have momentary brain farts, and sometimes a student will go way past the syllabus into the stratosphere and you have to try to think through what you know to give them an answer. But if you're teaching acid-base equilibria and a student is confused about the expression for K_a, it shouldn't even require thought. Let alone a flounce and "You know, you can't expect me to know all the answers immediately". Also, the college hasn't come close to finishing teaching of the syllabus. They're supposed to spend 135 hours on the core and 44 hours on the options, and while I don't know how long they spent on the core, I know they've only spent about 15 hours on the options. They only started teaching the option during the Easter holiday! (Yes, the students had to come in for extra lessons!). The whole thing has been one unmitigated disaster and I have been advising all of my younger students and their parents to Avoid That College Like The Plague.

Anyway. Tonight R gave me an exam paper to mark that seemed quite good. I was pleased with her answers, especially to the longer, harder questions at the end, which she had previously been too terrified of to even attempt. When I calculated the percentage and checked the mark against the examiners' report, I found it was in the level 4-5 range, which is what she needs for university. Considering that she started at level 2, this is a huge improvement. When she left to cycle home I phoned her mother to tell her how well she's doing. Of course, I don't know what will happen on the exam day, and grades can never be certain until you have the official letter. But I am confident that she will do orders of magnitude better than she would have if I hadn't worked with her. The fact that I get to work with students and see this improvement in them makes my job - sometimes, even my very existence - worthwhile.

ARGH! STRESS!!

Today I got out of bed at 2 pm and ran out of spoons by 4.30 pm. I'm wondering if that's a new record. I don't get to fall over properly for a whole calendar month: the kids' last exam is June 19th. May have died by then.

Our extremely brief trip to Blackpool was good, but now I have three more livejournal entries to add to the ones I already had to write, plus a few hundred more photos to shift through and upload. Need more free time, so I can sleep, if nothing else. Also, for some reason I woke up abruptly at 7 am both mornings I was away (while Richard dreamed happily beside me), so I had 4.5 hours sleep on Thursday night and 6 hours sleep on Saturday night. Gah!

Took all the exam papers I had to mark on the trip. 9 hours of trains meant I'd done most, but not all. Got home to find 6 more pushed through my letterbox. Acquired 3 more today. Argh!

Am 440 entries behind on the default view version of my livejournal friends page. May not catch up ever. In idle moments while actually here, have been posting comments on interesting things or where I have an opinion that hasn't already been expressed, but I'm not sure whether anyone is seeing those comments. If I had more time at this exact moment, I'd post a poll asking whether you get emails of comments and read them (I only get emails of my own comments, and they go straight into a filtered folder that I rarely read), but I really don't have time. I'm only online now because I put the computer on to type up some notes for students :/

OK, so I'm not completely un-geeky. Today I finally got sick of the computer at work that's been running at the speed of treacle, and took an hour out of my life to fix it. It was absolutely infested with viruses and spyware. I deleted over 1000 of them! Computers with 1000 pieces of malware really don't run at their optimal speed.

The problem with that computer is that the students have access to it, including some quite young kids. And they'll download "games" and "screensavers" that come with 101 nasties attached. And then people find they have malware and download one of these "malware fixing" programs that is actually itself malware. Those things drive me insane. I feel like it shouldn't take any common sense to realise that they're dubious - a program that will supposedly scan your hard drive for free, but won't fix anything until you register it? "O hai, I upgraded ur hard drive. U have 1234 malwarez. Pay me $25 munniez 2 fix it." - is that not a huge red flag? But people are so scared & confused about how computers work, they don't realise the inherent contradiction. Legitimate anti-malware programs recognise that we all have a vested interest in keeping other people's systems clean because it helps to keep our systems clean. The more networked computers that are sitting there full of crap, the more crap is going to get transferred to my computer, and the more work my bug blatter has to do. Meh.

Anyway, I spent an hour of my life doing that, and got called a "genius". (I think it helped that I used Spybot - Search and Destroy, which has an easy to find language changer (so I could run the program in English then switch it to Korean for the people whose computer it is)). Though I now feel slightly guilty, because they were so, so grateful to me for cleaning up the computer - but the main reason I did it was because I'd been forced to use that computer to look at a student's coursework, and it had been driving me nuts with its extreme slowness. There must be a word for that - guiltiness due to being praised for doing something which you did primarily for selfish reasons? Hmmm.

I am sick yet-a-bloody-gain. I have some sort of lurgy. Not sure if it's a cold or flu or just Epstein-Barr reactivating for fun. The latter seems a possibility as my glands are up and I have a sore throat from hell.

My work has been sucking my life lately, taking up every single spoon that I possess and leaving me with none at all for myself. This time of year is always crazy, as there's a set of public exams in January which are far too early in the school year considering how important they are. But lately I've been working 6, 7, 8 or even 9 hours a day - 6 days a week. This is... crazy. It can't go on. I work part-time because I need to for my health, yet I'm struggling with more than full-time hours.

I haven't been around online because I'm coming home every day and collapsing, almost literally. I've been getting in and lying on the bed, too tired & brain-fried to do anything except play with the Wii in a prone position. I've been going to sleep at the sort of hours when most people in my timezone go to bed, and staggering out of bed anything from 10-15 hours later. I need to figure out how to divest myself of the job that's killing me before it actually does.

Need More Spoons Plz.

I am a million, trillion, zillion years behind with livejournal. Or about 10 days. Same difference :)

Stuff in my life is generally "ok". Richard had a birthday! We went out for delicious curry at Joy with hatter, mjl, otterylexa and rowan_leigh & fluffymormegil, who we don't get to see enough. Sadly, the sekrit surprise guests hiddenpaw & sangluna couldn't come due to stock issues. I bought Richard a The Sun Is Trying To Kill Me sweatshirt from J!NX, and also their Disobey hoodie, and my mum got him the most excellent heavy metal t-shirt in the world ever. To my disappointment, it does not feature hexavalent chromium, but many other heavy metals are represented in true metal font.

Had an asthma & allergy review which was spectacularly boring. Apparently I do absolutely everything right, and there are no other drugs they can give me, so I'm going to have to live with my current level of chronic snot forever (or at least until they invent something new). This is really quite depressing. People without chronic snot can almost certainly not understand how debilitating it is (it's like having a cold or hay fever, with all the head stuffiness and confusion, and itchy nose and ears and sinus pain, and irritability due to itchiness; only it never goes away, and never gets any better). I'm ridiculously allergic to dust mite faeces and sulphur dioxide, and also slightly allergic to pollen, mould spores, various scents, generic PM10 and ozone... there is no season in which I am not constantly snotty, and I'm sick of it :X

I have a new printer which is revolutionising my work environment. It's an HP Officejet which can print and photocopy in full colour double-sided, and has a sheet feeder. It takes less than a minute to print a quantity of material which would take my crappy HP home printer over 15 minutes. It is very sexy. Bizarrely, I bought it through PC World's business division, and got to pay £70 less for it than it would have cost me to buy it from the regular store. Apparently businesses are heavily subsidised compared to home users. New HP-branded ink cartridges were around half of the home users' price (or about what I normally pay to get my existing cartridges refilled). I wish I'd known this - ooh, four years ago when I started being self-employed :P

The tricycle may actually be ready to ride tomorrow. Hooray. Have been exhausting myself walking everywhere. Excitement will be postponed until I know if the repair worked.