Monday, August 2, 2010

Marking Sucks

So, after not having posted in a while, I return to complain about being a TA! Excitement! Well, there are a few other details, but first with the complaining!

For the course that I'm TAing this term, the people in charge decided that each TA would mark an entire assignment, by themselves. Thus I have found myself, over this long weekend, spending a lot of time marking assignments which really sucks. As I've no doubt mentioned before, marking is generally boring and this assignment has been really painful to mark. First, the course material is not in my area of interest (thus I don't particularly care for it much) and second, most of the questions are actually hard to mark because they're the sort of thing where one has to try and follow the student's train of thought which is not always easy, especially since I do try to figure out what the students are trying to do and give part-marks rather than just put in a big X when something's wrong.

On the plus side, since I only mark one assignment it means I haven't had to do TA work for most of the term (besides the midterm), but I honestly think this is too much for one person to do in any reasonable amount of time and I think I'd prefer having the pain spread out a bit. Having each TA do half the marking for two assignments would, I think, be a better arrangement.

In less complainy news, I discovered a new recipe last night! Its from the (now much abused) cook book that I've had for ages and is a recipe for hamburger-vegetable soup. It turned out quite tastey and is definitely going on my will-make-again list.

I also managed to sneak in a little bit of work on the QRT project this weekend despite the marking (and some FASS work today), which I really must write about in more detail sometime, and not just because I said I would about a year ago and never did.

Well, that's all for the present.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

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