I feel a bit brain dead today. Spent about 30 hours marking over the weekend and yesterday. I even got up at 6am yesterday and got to uni by 7am and promptly discovered that they don't unlock the outer doors until about 7:45. Doh! Luckily it was sunny so I sat on the steps with coffee and madly marked. Had marking meetings from 10:30 to 12. Then the other tutor and I made up the spreadsheet and entered all the marks for all 6 pieces of assessment for all 70 students. Tiresome, but there is no way around it. Plus you have to be so focused, don't want to write the wrong mark down for someone. Luckily we didn't have anyone insisting we use the world's worst learning software (LMS) and spend forever entering them in gradebook. The other tutor and I had estimated that it would take an hour per student to enter the marks and comments online because the interface is so clunky and it loads like you are using dial up c. 1998. We figured if they insisted we would simply inform them that was fine and were they fine paying for another 70 hours at casual rates? But in the end they didn't care.

We don't need to put our comments up, only respond if a student actually emails us. On the one hand this is quite nice for me as writing comments takes A LOT of time and can be mentally taxing as you try and find 30 different ways to say 'the introduction was too waffly' and avoid saying anything too negative, or accidentally putting an apostrophe in wrong place as you critique their use of grammar. BUT I feel it is a huge disservice to the students, especially the many who clearly didn't know how to write an essay, or even how to write a sentence! These are the students who really need the feedback but won't be the ones who contact us. I think (hope) if everyone gets back some comments that some of it does sink in.

Anyway, I always bring this stuff up but I end up feeling like everyone thinks I am a naive idealist. Or else they just tell me that ''This subject is about opening up their minds not worrying about the little stuff." Well you must have opened up their minds a lot as it is pretty clear from the standard of writing that a lot of their brains had fallen out. Or they tell me that 'this course isn't about teaching them to write they can learn that themselves.'

Well super dooper, but if unis don't teach them how to write who the hell will? How are they meant to teach themselves? Of course students have to work on it themselves, I had to do that, but it was greatly assisted by lecturers who took the time to spell out what was expected, show us common mistakes, remind us we didn't need to 'thesaurise' every second word, explain why and how we should use foonotes and really just let us know why we got the mark we did. Otherwise, especially for students who are not good at writing, the reasoning behind an essay mark can seem all a bit mysterious.

Anyway rant over. Marking is done in record time, which was my plan as I have a tendency to let it take over my life and brain for far too long. I am pretty pleased with myself. Now I just need to cross some other stuff of my not very long but super urgent to do list.

1. Finish my Kent article. I confess it is a few weeks late, and this is after asking for more time.

2. Send Chapters 4&5 to supervisor, I finished them literally months ago, why haven't I sent them? Probably some deep seated mental block to do with fear of criticism.

3. Re-draft Chapter 3 after having it rather demolished by supervisor a few months back. All valid criticism I am just SICK of the damn thing.

4. Write draft of Chapters 6 & 7.

5. Get back to compiling my image catalogue with my ye olde worlde photo editing software.