This won’t be posted until tomorrow, which means I break my rule of trying to post every day. I haven’t really been close to a computer all day and right now I am so tired I can barely force myself to write this.
Today I marked a bunch of assignments, and then I got Chris to drive me up to the school. I was going to drive myself, but it’s been snowing really hard all day, enough so that the trees are all lacy white and the roads are completely snow-covered. Chris was leery of me going, as I don’t have a lot of winter driving experience at the moment, so I told him that I definitely needed to go, and it would be either under my own direction, or he could drive and wait while I finished all my running around.
Up at the school I popped in to a study session that some of my students organised. Only a few people were there, from their postings on the online course tools I was expecting about 40 students to be there. They seemed pretty gratified that I actually showed up, so I guess I am still the nice TA. I answered most of their questions and gave some pointed hints about how to study. All too often, when they are “studying” it means that they are copying the textbook out word-for-word and that is kind of useless as an exercise. So I asked them questions back, and played Socrates and told them how to summarise a chapter into one page of notes. The exam is multiple choice, so all they really need to do is learn how to recall and link the major themes and ideas.
After that, I went and got the exams and the answer sheets and took them over to my office. I really hope the weather is nice on Monday so I can drive. If not, I am not looking forwards to carrying a large box full to the top of paper to the exam. The exams take up a box used to hold photocopy paper, so that is what, 5000 sheets of paper?
When we got back I did some marking and then commenced freaking out about Chris’s holiday party for work. I tried on what I wore last year and I thought it just made me look pudgy and dumpy. I tried on just about everything sort of fancy that I own and was so disappointed in everything. I need some more formal clothes. I finally decided on a cream v-necked blouse with lots of little pearl buttons up the front and a mandarin collar, my black suit jacket, and a different pair of black pants and some tall black boots. I curled my hair at the front after putting it up in two tortoiseshell clips, and I even slapped on some makeup.
The party overall was ok. I am glad we found some of Chris’s coworkers that we knew well, so we didn’t have to sit at a table of strangers all night. We got a gift certificate in the first set of door-prize drawings, which means we left the party by 10:30pm.
Now that we are home, I have changed into comfy clothes and I am about to settle into more marking. I am about a day behind where I wanted to be at this point, which is really frustrating.