Not fair :-(

Today was a very long day with a whole morning of teaching and practice supervision, followed by a whole afternoon of presentations by students. Not bad on average, but we’ll have to give them feedback on a few aspects of oral presentations. I say « we » because this is supposed to be organised by two professors (including me) and a TA.

Both have left it mostly to me to :
-come up with a project for the students to do
-write up the documentation
-find the data
-follow up on organisation.

As if such an unfair share of the work wasn’t insulting enough, the other prof who is supposed to take the same part as me in marking the essays for this has been useless there too, but what makes it worse is the excuses he’s been coming up with :
-he has been very busy (aren’t we all ?)
-he has been very busy preparing A new lecture (this is my first year : all my lectures are new, and I have little experience in the course prep)
-the essays are boring.

Yeah, you read right. Boring. He gave me the load of them today, saying he “took a look” at them, but they were soporific… So I asked whether he made comments or suggestions for marks. He did not – which probably means that he literally just gave them a quick look but didn’t read them in enough detail to come up with anything useful.

The reports are just the first part of a larger project. They are supposed to describe field site selection and field visits the students did. Of course they weren’t going to be full of exciting quantitative analysis! But the consequence is that I can do the whole marking business.

This guy has a reputation of being terribly messy, but this isn’t messy, this is taking the piss. (And I’m pissed off).

On another note, I am going to an interview tomorrow as part of an application for funding to spend three months this autumn in a lab in the US! Much more exciting stuff!