17/11/2015

Long day – about 12 hours today (it’s open evening here at College) – and I always find that by the time I get home (8.15pmish) I’m still buzzing – so getting to sleep is difficult.

Trouble is, the team are still in red-alert mode as we’re in the middle of an ‘observation window’ – where any session you teach on might be visited by a clipboarded person who checks if you’re brilliant, or crap.  Every teaching session needs informing by a raft of paperwork: the annual plan, a profile list of various learning difficulties, timetables, registers . . . 2-folders worth.

I am currently sat in a classroom where IT students cannot save work, because there is some system problem.  The same problem as yesterday, a different problem to last week, which was similar to the problem the week before – itself a re-run of the ‘glitch’ experienced the week before that.

Is anyone counting?

These items occurring just after the set-up weeks (Sept – into end October) where you’re requesting capacity uplifts (why?) to have printers attached to PCs that need them (why?) to have Moodle available to an entire Course (why?) – a score of IT glitches, or misconfigurations that a lecturer – moving from room to room during the course of a timetable tries to sort out, and just about manages by the end of October.  I’ve just counted – I have sent 39 emails to MITS since the beginning of this academic year – all dealt with brilliantly, I have to say.

The lecturers put a really brave face on it, but – let’s be honest, we’ve all become a little scared of saying anything.

Meanwhile (and this week alone – my god it’s only Tuesday) – we are here: Capacities shrink, or Drives disappear altogether, files appear and disappear, files become read-only, entire software suites magically ‘not there’ after some upgrade, or some alteration.

Today (18/11/15) an excellent 2nd year A-Level student was within a centimetre of losing a year’s work – where the PC was steadily corrupting her memory-stick, I had enough time to help her – in-between pressing a keyboard stroke, and then waiting for the character to appear on-screen, a few seconds later.