I am feeling a little bit swamped at the moment.
I put my notice in two weeks ago on my flat and I am moving into A.’s place. We are looking for something together for us and B. We think we have found a realy nice place. Fingers crossed. A. got notice about three weeks ago; the owner of her rental is selling. She gets 60 days. I had moved my computer and work stuff over about six weeks ago and have basically been living here since then.
Tuesday week (22/04) I graduate. My folks are coming over, and maybe my big brother if he feels up to it. He has been having another rough time of late. This has been a bit stressful. It will be cool if he can make it.
On Friday, after we viewed the property we are hoping to rent, A. was involved in a car crash. A young bloke drove through a stop sign and A. crashed her brand new MY08 Subaru Forester with 1800 kms on the clock into the side of his car. No one was hurt too badly. I banged up my knee a bit.
Lastly, on the work front. Lot’s happening. More on this later. Nothing fun. I have figured out that 2% of students cause 98% of problems. Managing the 2% takes up most of my time. Lots of marking. I am thinking that in terms of an academic career I need to get a book contract. I don’t really need an academic job for this. Academic work is fine, but the employment conditions are nonsense. So I might be trying to get work elsewhere in the future, doing work that doesn’t operate according to silly sessional contracts and/or which can be relied on the whole year. Now I am living with others who rely on me to make sure I pay my rent and have money for food and other such luxuries. During the teaching session this is fine.
The utter stupidity of the casual teaching system in the tertiary education sector needs to be rethought. 12 month contracts with a certain contact hour/teaching load that are staggered (some signed at the start or halfway through the year) should replace sessional casual contracts. Sessional contracts should be banned because they force workers to have 3 or 4 half-time jobs to produce a tapestry of incomes of various durations.
Oh, and I have been a shithouse friend to most of my friends lately. I promsie to be a better friend very shortly when a lot of this calms down a bit.
Catching up with your posts, Glen. Let it be said that your passion and erudition are inspiring to some of us! Missed reading you and won’t get slack again. I’m at wolvesevolve.wordpress.com now.
The teaching conditions of tertiary staff at a non-commercialising University right now are going to cost this country very very dearly indeed. Its going to take years to fix and years again to see any benefits. Like you, I don’t mind working my guts out and doing the montage-to-victory thing in hope of good publishing speed one day, because its still a privileged life – but the infrastructure needs to be there to make the gut-busting actually produce the results.
Glad you’re ok Glen – (hug) – & congrats on the graduation. I will toast!
Good idea about the annual contracts. Shame you aren’t on the 2020 list for this weekend. Hope you both can come to the CRN State of the Industry conference next year. We plan to spend a whole day talking about this stuff and hopefully get somewhere with it. Stay tuned x
I wish I was closer, so I could help with all the packing. I did something for “me” today – and that helps with the handling of all the stress. My first day of the school holidays. Still haven’t made any bookings, but shall be in touch as soon as we know P’s story.