• My sister texted me from a restaurant last night, where her server noticed the surname on her credit card and asked if she were related to me. Apparently I have massively assisted him in every year of his studies and he is very grateful. I am not sure if this actually compensates for the hell aspects of this helljob, but it's very nice to hear. ( Read more... )

Bloody load shedding again, ye gods I hate living in a third world country. I am at the stage where I can tell that the lights are off when I get home by the quality of the alarm system's beep, it's a semitone lower when on battery power than it is when on mains. (I don't actually have perfect pitch, but I have sufficient musical training that I ( Read more... )

Favourite instance of student narcissism this week: it's 6.30am today, I have come up to campus early (for the sixth day in a row) to catch up with emails. There's one in my box, sent just after midnight, in which the student asks for late registration information, stating, with some indignation, that she emailed the relevant administrator last ( Read more... )

This is one of my least favourite times of year: it's the deep breath before all the crazy hits. Orientation is the week after next, a week earlier than usual owing to semester scheduling shenanigans from the Powers That Be, and I am frantically finalising orientation and registration material and logistics while simultaneously fending off almost ( Read more... )

Things that make me homicidal: having a student arriving in my ofice to add a summer term course to her record. Telling her she is too late to do so, the deadline was Friday and she's effectively missed a quarter of the course. Having her become visibly grumpy and petulant when her sob story about being too busy doing other things to add it earlier ( Read more... )

Oh, joy, 'tis the season, fa-la-la-la-la. Not, in fact, the thrice-dratted Xmas season, although of course it is, and promptly with the dawning of November supermarkets have blossomed forth in all the usual seasonally-inappropriate merry snow imagery in the midst of African summer, glitzy Northern Hemispherical Christmas trees, and the usual ( Read more... )

Well, that was odd. I've just had the Protester Ringleader in my office again, to make the course drop we discussed a few weeks back. It was a weirdly cordial interchange, where he apologised for disrupting my lecture and assured me it was just politics, nothing personal. And that he does not in any way endorse the bus-burning and throwing-things- ( Read more... )

So, the SA government, bless its cotton socks, has announced, perfectly predictably after much backing and filling, that free tertiary education is not viable, and radical student movements are seething. We lost two days from last week with protesting crowds prowling the campus with sticks, and lectures have been suspended yesterday and today. The ( Read more... )

I have just had my second English lecture shut down by student protesters, right in the middle of a particularly pithy bit about postcolonial readings of Frankenstein. We were deconstructing a white British nineteenth-century novel in terms of its representation of marginalised racial identities, what the hell more do the protesters want? I did a ( Read more... )

I am apparently at a stage in my personal and professional development where I can, calmly and quietly, spent the better part of half an hour gently talking down the angry student protest leader who has come into my office to discuss his options in dropping a course. Not that he was overtly angry, it's more a sort of subliminal, simmering rage and ( Read more... )