Fuddland
Landmark day today: I made a kid cry in one of my classes for the first time.
In: Work Work
2006 / 03 / 16 – 21:07 | Comment [3] | Top
There is one particular student I teach, a young girl by the [chosen, English] name of Mary, whose voice is, for some reason, especially grating. There is something about the pitch, or the volume, or the pace at which she speaks, as well as the way she carries on talking long after she has supplied me with whatever answer I’m looking for — to the point where I have to interrupt and tell her to sit down — that is not, to put it delicately, very easy on the ears. Naturally I assumed I was the only one whose teeth gnashed together every time Mary opened her mouth, until I noticed that whenever she stands up to speak, a number of the other students quickly put down their pens and, without ceremony — as if they were reacting to the fifteenth air-raid siren that week and it was merely part of their day-to-day lives — put their fingers in their ears until she has once again fallen silent.
I would take these students to one side and chastise them for being so rude to their classmate, if I didn’t find the whole thing so very amusing [and wasn’t so jealous that I couldn’t use them same aural defence myself].
In: China / Teaching in China & Work Work
2006 / 03 / 06 – 22:08 | Comment [1] | Top
Over the Christmas week I’m volunteering for Crisis, the London-based charity for homeless people. Their work carries on year-round, but they are probably most famous for the Crisis Open Christmas scheme, started nearly forty years ago, which provides shelter, hot meals, showers, entertainment, health checks, advice, skills workshops, and simple companionship, all completely free of charge, to any of London’s homeless [and the so-called “hidden homeless” — people not neccessarily sleeping rough on the streets, but in hostels, on friends’ floors, in Bed & Breakfasts, who face the same problems with finding work and enough money to get by].
Yesterday I attended one of the several induction sessions Crisis run in the lead-up to the week, pleasantly surprised to see every seat filled. As a general volunteer I’ll be given a variety of tasks, including making tea, serving food, cleaning up, guarding no-go areas, and the thing that the coordinators have emphasised as the most important duty of all: talking to the guests. Designated to work at the main shelter [this year at the London Arena in Docklands] I was assigned my shifts a few days ago, and I’m on the night-shift, 10:15pm–8:30am, for five of the seven nights that COC runs.
Crisis can never have too many volunteers, and there is still time to offer your services [people with a skill or trade are particularly useful], so if you are interested in helping out, learn more from the Crisis website, or simply turn up at one of the remaining induction sessions:
- Tuesday December 13th 2005 6.45pm–8.45pm
- Abbey Community Centre, 34 Great Smith Street, London NW1P 3BU
- (Nearest tube St James’ Park and Westminster)
- Saturday 17th December 2005 10.30am–12:30pm
- Park Crescent Conference Centre (international students house), 229 Great Portland Street, London W1
- (Nearest tubes Gt. Portland Street and Regents Park)
- Saturday 17th December 2005 2.00pm–4:00pm
- Park Crescent Conference Centre (international students house), 229 Great Portland Street, London W1
- (Nearest tubes Gt. Portland Street and Regents Park)
In: Local News / Crisis Open Christmas 2005 & Indexed & Local News & Work Work
2005 / 12 / 11 – 10:40 | Comment [1] | Trackback [1] | Top
The news of the death of Bob Hunter, co-founder of Greenpeace, has gotten me thinking back to my days as a Greenpeace canvasser in Toronto, in the summer of 1996. If you’ve know me for more than ten minutes then chances are I’ve already told you all about this, so you can go and make a cup of tea or something whilst I tell the others.
The job of the canvasser is, as you might expect, to go door-to-door trying to rally up support for the organisation they represent. Now I know that, at least in the UK, in terms of how welcome a visitor to ones door they are, door-to-door solicitors for pressure groups are generally on a par with bailiffs and pitchfork-wielding lynch mobs, but in Canada I found it to be a different story. On the whole, people were receptive and those that didn’t want to support Greenpeace for whatever reason at least gave me either a friendly, “Not interested,” before I said much, or listened to what I had to say before nicely saying no. My task was not simply to ask for monetary donations to swell Greenpeace’s coffers, but to get people to become card-carrying members — a pressure group relies on the size of its membership to put the weight of public opinion behind its causes.
The canvassing staff are divided up into groups of five or six and given a part of town to work on; each team has a field manager who assigns sub-sections of the area to each canvasser. After a couple of days of shadowing more established canvassers, learning about the issues in general and the specifics of Greenpeace’s work, I was trusted with my own turf each afternoon in which to sign up as many members as I could.
I was rubbish.
In: Local News & Work Work & World News
2005 / 05 / 03 – 20:04 | Top
I’ve been earning some pocket money as an examination invigilator over the last couple of days — twelve quid an hour for sitting or standing around watching people either furiously scribbling or staring into space is not to be sniffed at.
Yesterday evening’s one took place at the Student Health Centre, where I watched over two poor souls who were forced to take their exams despite being ill enough to be admitted to Sick Bay. Still, they didn’t actually look all that sick to me; they had no issues and I managed to read an entire novel in that one sitting.
Today’s was more active — over a hundred students, three different papers being sat, and plenty of questions: requests for the toilet [escorted by the porters]; requests for the dictionary [allowed]; requests to get their ruler/eraser from their bags [not allowed, no matter how many times you ask me — and no you can’t borrow one from someone else either].
The following instructions proved extremely difficult to follow for a lot of people: answer each question in a separate answer-book [written in bold on the exam paper and announced at the beginning]; if you finish early, do not leave your seat until your script has been collected [because you’ve probably forgotten to fill in the front cover with your details]. And I did pity the poor girl who tried to take away a supplementary answer-booklet because it contained “rough work”. Anything they’ve written in must be handed in, so I had to take it back and tie it to her main script — noting first that all she’d written on it was something like, “I am so lost in this exam. I think I’ll write out a song instead”, followed by two full pages of lyrics.
Still, at least she didn’t argue when I said I needed to have it, unlike the chap who insisted his supplementary booklet contained only rough work. I told him to cross out any work he didn’t want considered for marking. He said that the entire booklet was rough work. “Then you’ll have to cross it all out,” I was forced to tell him.
And finally, a round of applause please for the fellow who sat the wrong exam and didn’t realise until an hour into it — it does pay to read the preamble before the first question.
In: Work Work
2005 / 01 / 12 – 17:25 | Comment [2] | Top
Phew. All spam essays marked. Will to live intact, but just barely. The bad grammar, bizarre, sweeping statements and terrible descriptions of Monty Python sketches stopped being amusing fairly rapidly and just became irritating and tiresome. Much like spam itself, actually: I was faintly titillated by spam and its strange offerings when it first started cropping up a few years ago, but these days I’d much rather not have to deal with it at all.
Sadly some of us haven’t gotten over this initial amusement, as in the case of an officemate who enjoys nothing more than reading, and reading aloud, the spam messages he’s received overnight — obviously opening them in the security-sieve that is Outlook is his first mistake, merrily informing the spammers that his email address is indeed active and they should send him a whole lot more; not setting up the University’s SpamAssassin score-based filter is another mistake but would naturally rob him of his morning fun and games so maybe that’s intentional; but informing the room that he “doesn’t want a large penis” was just plain foolish.
In: Work Work
2004 / 05 / 25 – 16:17 | Comment [3] | Top
Much of the weekend was, and most evenings this week will be, spent marking Computer Science essays entitled “Spam and the abuse of email”. I’m about a quarter of the way through, and there have been some classic, sweeping statements made regarding the problems that spam causes. Circumventing the Data Protection Act by cunningly exploiting the loophole of ignoring it entirely, here are a few examples:
“Spam is such a problem that students are writing essays on the subject.” My goodness, I didn’t realise it was that serious.
This has to be the typo of the year: “whwtehetr” instead of “whether”.
Apparently some “people don’t go out in public because they [sic] afraid of being spammed”. Are we talking about email spam, or being slapped on the forehead to the cry of “Spam!” like we [well, not me, of course] used to do at school?
When listing sources, most people call it a “bibliography”, or give it the heading “References”; I’d prefer either of those to “Links of Inspiration”. And “my own knowledge” is not generally a recognised source, at least not by me.
The note that “sources are written in italics” isn’t much good to me when you’re instructed to submit a plain text file.
“A large quantity of spam is sent during manhours”. No kidding.
“Over the past century spam has increased enormously.” Probably only since, you know, we’ve actually had computers, email and the internet though.
“Privacy is a prized value”. Yes. Erm. What?
You can’t write me a little note after your essay explaining that you’re sorry you’ve gone over the word limit by about 1,000 words but you couldn’t see how to make it shorter when you’ve spent half a page explaining how your Dad gets all excited when he receives 200 new messages only to be disappointed they’re all spam. Give me facts and figures, not anecdotes!
“Spam can contain sexually implicit images.” Bastards, not only do they send porn, it’s porn I have to think about.
And if I have to read one more unfunny, eighth-hand description of the Monty Python Spam Sketch from people who’ve never seen a single Python sketch I think I might go a bit mad. But not before I’ve scribbled out every usage of the word “quote” as a noun and scrawled “quotation” in the space above it.
Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam…
In: Work Work
2004 / 05 / 17 – 16:37 | Comment [10] | Trackback [2] | Top
Wanted urgently: air-fresheners of all varieties, or failing that, some of that Vicks Vaporub-like stuff Agent Starling puts on her upper lip to block the stench of the corpse in The Silence of the Lambs.
I’m doing my weekly Maths Help drop-in session in the Student Learning Centre. Due to the rain [which is actually very welcome, melting all the dangerous ice that made walking and driving pretty hazardous over the last couple of days — until the fallen rain all freezes tonight of course] and the steady flow of people walking in to the building with wet shoes, the carpet is throwing up a quite revolting stench. To add to the discomfort, in a bid to air the place out all the doors have been jammed open — so it’s smelly and cold. Human suffering at its very worst, I’m sure you’ll agree.
I’d better not have any actual people to help with their Maths problems as well — that’d be the last straw.
??? Error using ==> zeros
Out of memory. Type HELP MEMORY for your options.
>> HELP MEMORY
??? HELP MEMORY
|
Error: Missing operator, comma, or semicolon.
it’s been one of those days.
following on from the initial yay and huzzah on sunday, today sees a further, louder version due to the end of teaching for the semester. as an extra treat i got to hand out all the marking; it was particularly pleasurable watching the faces of plagiarists seeing they’d been caught. some laugh, some look sheepish, some just look blank; i’m not sure if there’s any reaction that’s appropriate, but it’s the laughers that annoy me the most: they don’t appear to realise that the person they copied also gets punished. harsh, but that’s the policy, and no one has protested about it…yet.
In: Work Work
2003 / 12 / 09 – 17:10 | Comment [4] | Top
2003 / 12 / 07 – 17:30 | Comment [1] | Top
2003 / 12 / 03 – 19:40 | Comment [8] | Top
2003 / 11 / 18 – 14:08 | Comment [13] | Top
2003 / 11 / 11 – 13:57 | Comment [8] | Top
2003 / 10 / 28 – 16:50 | Comment [6] | Top
2003 / 10 / 21 – 18:38 | Comment [2] | Top
2003 / 10 / 14 – 11:58 | Comment [3] | Top
2003 / 10 / 13 – 22:36 | Comment [6] | Top
2003 / 09 / 17 – 17:12 | Comment [1] | Top
2003 / 09 / 16 – 18:00 | Comment [8] | Top
2003 / 06 / 02 – 11:56 | Comment [3] | Top
2003 / 05 / 28 – 13:04 | Comment [2] | Top
2003 / 05 / 26 – 12:46 | Top
2003 / 05 / 24 – 16:33 | Comment [4] | Top
2003 / 05 / 23 – 13:15 | Comment [13] | Top
2003 / 05 / 19 – 15:11 | Top
Read the rest of “copy and paste your way out of university”…
2003 / 05 / 18 – 20:58 | Comment [3] | Top
