It's Monday, time for a rant list! Things That Have Got Right Up My Nose, and which I require to be blasted by the Cosmic Wossnames forthwith:

• The weather. 39 degrees on Saturday, 37 yesterday. Today is only supposed to be 26, but my otherwise much appreciated little house tends to trap temperature extremes lovingly and recreate them for the next ( Read more... )

Orientation/registration hellseason seems to have leaped out of the gate with considerable verve and velocity this year, I have been working 11-hour days since the start of last week. I am thus currently submerged in the usual sticky and insistent morass of remote registration admin, orientation site design, continuous student queries, advisor ( Read more... )

I am, once again, a very tired thing in the limp chewed string category, it's been a long year, and one very full of emergencies and makeshifts and adaptations, all demanding unlikely quantities of my time and mental energy. It was exam committee season last week; over four days, including the weekend, I individually checked around 1500 student ( Read more... )

We have nearly finished processing the returning student registrations, which means that currently we are doing the last-minute ones concurrently with orientation and registration for the new students. This is not an auspicious year in which to begin your university career: we are teaching largely online this year, and the remote format is going to ( Read more... )

There is a student in my inbox with whom I have had an email exchange lasting (counts them...) NINE emails, during which I have tried patiently and unavailingly to get him to tell me a single, simple fact: what exact curriculum change is he trying to make? He has managed, over the repeated emails, to completely ignore this, sending me cheerful two- ( Read more... )

• No matter how organised you are and how much forethought and planning you show, the bulk of your time will be spent waiting for other people to do their necessary bit.
  
  • Corollary: my Cherished Institution is a particularly slow and inefficient bureaucracy with, at present, really poor leadership, I am beyond tired at negotiating Academic Life Under ( Read more... )

Student funding application deadline this week, which means my inbox has been flooded with last-minute students needing my advisor signature on their appeals, leading to such student gems as "Do I qualify for the course I want to add?" with no further details. My life is not made measurably better by the need to fire off frequent emails in the ( Read more... )

My desk chair arrived! choosing, of course, the one single stretch in the 8 hours of the working day when I was actually on a video call, which I suppose is the Cosmic Wossnames for you, but on the upside it wasn't actually a work call, I was catching up illegally with jo&stv on the grounds of, fuck, I worked one 12-hour Friday and one 7-hour ( Read more... )

ah, Dear Little Students. This afternoon's gem: cannot log onto the student database, because she's forgotten her login details, therefore massive panic about submitting a curriuclum change form by today's deadline. Is emailing me from her university email, which... uses exactly the same username and password as the student database. I have gently ( Read more... )

I am in the throes of remote orientation and remote curriuclum advice simultaneously, which is at the very least preventing boredom. It's also keeping my blood pumping as I patiently answer email queries whose answer was contained in the announcement I have just sent out and which was quoted in the query. Yelling and shaking helpless fists at the ( Read more... )