Suzi's Notebook

We love you: that's why we're here - weeknotes s1e2

Spent a sunny lunchtime sitting in Woky Ko eating their duck noodle salad and reading Hail the Maintainers, both of which I’d recommend. I liked the idea that innovation is what used to be called progress, only without the claim to actually improve anything.

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Next week is Welcome Week - Week Zero - when the students return. This is preparation time for the university. For me that’s meant chasing people to find out what they are expecting from us, and documenting things, and working through last year’s stuff to decide what is still relevant. Housekeeping, maintaining.

I like this time though. The university always seems to me to have a rhythm and a prevailing mood. The beginning of the year is the most hopeful, optimistic time.

With a colleague I’ve been talking about trying to help network staff who are interested in teaching using games, and those who are doing so already. I hope that people would like to share, partly because I’d like to hear what they’re doing and partly because (I think) this is a relatively fringe area of teaching and it would be helpful for people to know about others who are doing it. At the moment though all we have is a stone and we can only hope to end up with soup.

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I’m writing this post at the weekend rather than as I go, which isn’t what I intended for this. As well as housekeeping, the last three weeks have been about balancing - failing to balance - work and home. Littlest started school and that brought with it the dreaded Settling In Period: three weeks of short school days which don’t remotely fit with having two working parents. Well, we got through it.

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And now it is the first day of welcome week. The week when we should see the students arrive and move slowly and block doorways and generally be new. But our new office doesn’t put us anywhere near this, and I do feel very disconnected and I do miss it. Working so removed from it makes more of a difference to what my job seems to be than I would ever have guessed.

A very long way from anywhere - weeknotes s1e1

What better time to start blogging about work than when I’m on holiday?

But today - a day from our staycation week - I found myself working on the reading for the next reading group, and then going to a shop, and the person who helped me in the shop was a current student. They wanted to talk about their experience of the university (they feel disconnected - so few contact hours, so many connections outside university) and about online marking (approves on the whole, very much approves of less paper, picked up one lot of essay feedback on top of a mountain using their phone because they could, finds the feedback less thorough than when people mark with pen and paper). Sees being my age (in your mid-40s) as old, and a good enough excuse for not being comfortable with technology. Yikes.

Anyway, I am sitting in a cafe a stone's throw from the office, choosing to think about work, on my day off. So maybe I like my job better than I give myself credit for.

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Small aside from our week by the sea.

On the pedalos, eldest declaring that as she was steering we were going to zigzag across the lake because “if you’re going in a straight line you’re not really steering”. This is a common misconception in the world of work too.

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And now we’re back.

I was thinking again about the student I spoke to and how different their experience of what university is seemed to mine - in particular the lack of connection.

When I was at university it was all-consuming. Everything was the university. I lived in halls for three years, I didn’t have a job, I knew no one there who wasn’t a current student or a member of staff. I didn’t have contact with friends from home while I was there. Only occasionally did I venture into the parts of town that weren’t effectively part of the university.

Being disconnected sounds like a problem, and it was one of the first things the student said to me so maybe they felt like it was a problem to them. But it may have advantages compared to the strange and secluded life I led as a student. Anyway, it’s different and it’s good to be reminded of what I don’t know.

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I found the weeknotes idea via @jukesie, like many good things. I'm note sure this really counts as a weeknote as it covers two weeks and those weren't working weeks. But it's a start :)