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.
--
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.
--
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.
--
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.
Comments