Tuesday 12 January 2010

Grotty

Tomorrow is the last day of the antibiotics and I'm not sure they've worked entirely.  Over the weekend my glands were very swollen and sore as were my ears and that continued until yesterday.  My throat still feels sore when I swallow and my eyes are all gunky and I have this cough as well.  I haven't been into work since last Wednesday and today was the first time I've the left the house since then as well.  I haven't officially been off sick as I've been marking practice questions at home and responding to the online forum where the students can post questions.  I actually wish I had gone off sick officially because then I would have been able to ignore everything, but that would have left the module co-ordinator the only one moderating the forums and marking practice questions as the other lecturer on the course was on annual leave.  Instead I got myself worked up over a couple of students; one in particular was nagging to meet me and I ended up having to cancel on them twice.  They then bombarded me with questions which is fair enough, but these questions weren't problems with the material, instead they were simply asking "what is the answer".  I emailed back answers to 9 questions and stated that they should use the online forum instead.  I got an email back asking one last question.  I replied and then last night when I got another email asking more or less "what is this section all about", I flipped, cut and pasted the email to the forum, answered it there and emailed student and said it was answered on the forum, not to email me again as I would not be answering private emails as it was unfair on other students.  After that the module co-ordiantor contacted me to say the student had also hassled her about my topic and that student appears not to have done the reading.  The exam is tomorrow.  All was fine until this evening when I discovered more questions from student on discussion forum, which I had already answered by email to student!  I nearly burst into tears, which I know is partly to do with still not feeling great as well as not having taken my venlafaxine last night.  As it's slow release missing a dose is felt more or less immediately. 

So, I'm heading into work tomorrow to collect exams for marking.  I'm debating whether I wait until Thursday to phone the doc and say I'm still not feeling right or to do it tomorrow.  Guess I should finish the antibiotics and see how tomorrow goes first of all.  I'm also worried because work is already piling up: 2 assignments for the PG teaching course are due in mid Feb, next week is full with the teaching course classes, marking in the evenings and monitoring my other class forum for problems.  After next week's PG teaching course classes I'm going to have another 2 assignments for May.  And after all that teaching will start fairly soon and while mine is light this term, I'm terrified I'm going to mess it up. 

2 comments:

madsadgirl said...

It's all about the 'C' word again. Have confidence in yourself and don't let lazy students grind you down. Obviously you need to tell the student who kept asking the questions that it would be better if they did the work for themselves, after all you're not going to write their exam for them.

I hope that you start to feel better soon. The last cold that I had lasted for about two months but I think that was partly because I was so low with being in hospital.

Anonymous said...

It's unfair that you should be bombarded with unnecessary questions when you're sick! They really should be taking the initiative to find it out for themselves.

I hope you get better soon :)

S
http://notjustmedical.wordpress.com