Must crack on... when I've done this. And finished my book, and...

Well, I've fallen on my feet as regards tutor allocation this year. I've just received a 17 page email from mine, that points students in the right direction for getting decent marks in their assignments. He seems to have a great sense of humour, which he'll certainly need when he reads my work. He writes wonderfully, which is reassuring for someone teaching a linguistics course. He's also made it clear that he's not impressed by unnecessarily big words: 'don't be tempted to call a spade a horticultural vertical soil penetration device,' we are told. That would be good advice for some of the students on the course facebook page. There are a small amount of them who think they come across as being uber clever by using ten really long words when two short ones would do. What they've actually done is panic some people into thinking the course is too difficult to understand. Three (out of a group of a hundred) have left the course already, and we've not even done the first assignment. 

Because of this highfalutin, pretentious bull, a rival facebook group has been started by students who speak everyday English and spell things wrong on occasions. Needless to say, I joined it. 

My first assignment has to be in by next Thursday. I've done most of the reading, and will hopefully bash everything out at the weekend. I can't do it at the moment, because the Class Bookworm has lent me a wonderful book about a servant girl who can do magic. I was going to save it until after my assignment, but made the mistake of reading the first page to see what it was like. 

It looked like it had the potential to be rather twee, but it's written with great humour and reminded me of Howl's Moving Castle. I do like exchanging books with the children, especially the Bookworm, as she has very good taste in authors. There's a 'reading cafe' thing starting at school soon at which, one teacher told me, stories are to be read and shared and generally celebrated with the children and their parents, in the hope that they'll start reading together. But only teaching staff are allowed to be trained up for it, so I'm in a bit of a sulk about that... 

I am honestly astounded and disgusted that some parents (in fact, most parents, if I go by what the children tell me) do not read to their children. I always, always read to mine (when they were younger. Now the eldest is in her twenties, she'd probably object to being forcibly read to). We started with picture books and moved on to Jane Hissey's Old Bear stories. Favourites included Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows. As they got older, we read Terry Pratchett's children's stories and Lemony Snicket, who taught me more about the correct use of apostrophes than any English teacher. The final read for Son Number Two and I was, I believe, Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about a little girl who gets lost in the woods and hallucinates about meeting the God of the Lost, whose face is made of wasps. (He was about twelve at the time, I hasten to add, in case you think I was reading that to a three year old.)

Anyway, I must go and do some OU work. Although, I've just discovered House and have recorded all the repeats on Sky. I've only got fourteen hour-long programmes to watch...