A bit out of date now, but feel I need to add this post, written a couple of weeks ago.
Where does the time go ? Cliché I know, but true nevertheless. So why am I making excuses ?
Well, multitasking seems to be getting harder as I get older and I seem to have less stamina (altho’ hopefully made up for by increasing experience).
Work has been very busy lately especially as I’m doing more class teaching this term and I need to do more lesson preparation. I’ve been giving feedback to first year students using grademark and they are lapping it up and want more. I shouldn’t complain as I hear from tutors who say their students don’t look at online feedback much. However the turnaround for giving feedback has been very quick; hence the pressure of work.
My job also entails a great deal of f2f, one-to-one tutorials and this has its own pressures. It can be very draining due to having to react to students’ needs very quickly and often with little prior knowledge of what the issues might be. And as I get older, I find it more tiring so then on going home at the end of the day, trying to start researching, reading and writing doesn’t happen as I fall asleep before I get the chance.
Trying to fit in PhD research during the working day has been difficult given that the Autumn term and the Spring term are the Learning Development Group’s busiest times. Also I have needed to prepare for the Day School recently by reading articles James (Avis) had set for us at the previous session. And I do like to be a ‘good’ student (the Headmistress at my girls’ grammar school has a lot to answer for) so felt I should prioritise the articles.
Then I mixed up the date by which I needed to send work to Lyn. I also forgot what we had agreed I would work on and ended up sending a rather basic description of what I’d been reading, almost as an annotated bibliography. On top of this I had the date for the next meeting with Lyn wrong as well – a week too early. All I can do is plead overwork and advancing age.
However, the material I had been reading involved a review of Cholmsky’s theories on language aquisition which I found really stimulating and if Chomsky is correct in his claim that there is a LAD located within the human brain, what implications does this have for students diagnosed as dyslexic ?
The Daley Post 