Two books for my September course arrived today, and I got that familiar 'what have I let myself in for?' feeling. Luckily I recognise it from other courses now. I like to get ahead by ploughing through as many of the books as I can before the courses start, and there are always lists of words I've never seen before and which make me panic and feel stupid. I suppose it does show that I actually learn things, though. I can read back through the Children's Lit stuff that made me buy a new dictionary, and understand it perfectly. (Well, apart from anything written by Kimberly Reynolds but as her name is used as a swear word on the course forum, I'm not too fussed by that.) Anyway, the new course is in two parts - the first is on sociolinguistics (which I must learn to spell correctly), and the other is on stylistic analysis of poetry, plays and prose fiction. It looks fascinating, but involves lots of Big Words. And every time it mentions stylistics, I think of the soul group from the 70's, which doesn't help.
Other courses-wise, I've finished. The final, big assignments have been sent, and now I just wait until August to see how well or badly I've done. I sent them in a bit early, as I wanted to get them out of the way, but it meant I had to leave the course Facebook groups. People kept writing about all the topics they'd covered, or they were asking questions about things I'd not thought of including, and it was all making me wonder if I'd done everything wrong. And I don't think I have...
On another topic, our school library is in the process of being catalogued by a lovely lady who's throwing most of our books out. I think she was pretty shocked that lots of our non-fiction is almost as old as I am, and politely told me that we need to buy new books. To which I politely replied that we had no money.
Yes, we know what happens next, and
I'll try not to...
Anyway, it turns out that our library is a bit of a mess, and she won't have time to catalogue all of the books. As I had eagerly agreed to be trained to run our library, it looks like I'm going to be in for quite a bit more work than I'd bargained for. And as I don't get any time out of the classroom, I may have to do some negotiating, timetable-wise. (I will try not to cry this time, though.)
On a happy note, The Daughter travels up from Cornwall tomorrow to stay for a few days. We haven't seen her since Christmas, so I'm looking forward to properly chatting. She's driving up, as the price of train tickets has gone through the roof, and I shan't be able to relax until I get that text saying she's arrived (she's staying with my parents as her allergy to our cats makes her quite ill now). I'm in awe of the way she will happily hop in the car and drive anywhere. My journeys take great planning and I play 'what if?' scenarios through my mind all of the preceding night.
So if I'm not back for a while, I'll either be catching up with The Daughter, or buried under a pile of books. I'm hoping for the former...
No comments:
Post a Comment