Saturday, May 08, 2004

Sick Marking

There should be a rule or rather a medical exemption for teachers who are ill, from marking. Although I've been ill since Wednesday, I've been forced to focus my wooly mind round marking essays. Every term, we're required to adminster 2 essays and 2 comprehensions on our poor gormless kids and us teachers are then tasked with the unpleasant job of marking it.

So, I have left, 2 piles of essays that I need to mark by Monday-which is NOT going to happen.

Anyway, my tonsil issue has become a full blown flu with the drip like a tap nose, the can't taste a damn thing taste buds and the crap, I'm going to lose my voice to this cough cough. But instead of resting, I go to a seminar this morning on biomedical ethics this morning. It's strange the moment people hear the word ethics and begin interoggations,in the form of questions to the distinguished speakers, worthy of the Mossad.

So because of my brief sojourn out of my home, I come back having lost my taste buds along the way and my head feels like it got filled with lead. Sleep would have helped, but noooo... I had marking to do which I obediently did.

But because of my sniffiness and ever dripping nose, plus a strong desire to fall asleep, I wasn't in the best of moods to mark at best mediocre essays.Like JNet said, it's much easier to be charitable when you don't feel like a truck's run over you and some pipes in your nose requires some serious plumbing work. And these essays were on the influence of the mass media. A fertile ground for horrendous causal leaps and gross over generalisations!

Here's a taste of what my muddle headed brain had to plough through this afternoon...

- Teenagers are exposed to such outrageous (read:MTV) culture at such a young and tender school going age, hence their minds are corrupted with sexual thoughts. It is not surprising as teenagers these days are living in a virutal sea of sexual imagery.

- Their defiance and disobedience can prove too much to handle for inexperienced parents.

- Innocent children who cannot differentiate right from wrong will be greatly polluted

- Pornography on the net is exploited by young teenagers to satisfy their thirst for lust

- The attempt at getting rid of the Second Amendment was frutile

- Grades may be important but to have good grades with a busy character and attitude is not glamourous at all.

- Unperceptive parents often fail to notice a change in their children's behaviour. THerefore, they do not take the necessary steps to prevent their children from falling into pornography.

- Underfunding of education causes juvenile deliquency because teachers are not committed to teach and impart their knowledge to the students as they are not paid enough. As a result, students do not have interests in attending thus they play truant and rather spend time with bad company. This is a problem because our literacy rate is a important statistic to gauge social development.

So yes. I tried very hard not to be too hard on them, but it was very hard not to fail them because their essays were so hard to read. Cool. I've committed one of my students' favourite sins... repetition. 2 more classes to go and in between that, I need to go for a Mothers' Day lunch and dinner tomorrow. Argh... more food.

And more food when I can't taste anything...is a travesty!!!! We had wings and ribs for dinner. I could taste sweet and I could sense texture but you could give me a frog to eat and I wouldn't have been able to taste the difference. And our friends were nice enough to bring me chocolate cake. Of which I could taste "mmmm... sweet....*silence*...nothing...absolutely nothing". A pure waste of good chocolate cake.

Well, I'm off now to get some eucalyptus oil into my nasal passages. Maybe then, I'll breathe a bit easier.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 23:28

0 thoughts...

0 thoughts...

Post a Comment

" Far in the stillness, a cat languishes loudly"