...So, LSA2 passed. Very close to a merit too, apparently, if it weren't that my paperwork sucks (yes, so my PDA should comment on...how I cannot master the Cambridge-speak). I'm really relieved, although the comment from the tutor, that I should see the lesson in retrospective with a bit of emotional distance, is not really a great help: after all, I taught the lesson, and the way I feel after teaching it is just naturally influencing my judgement, no matter what. In the previous lesson I was relieved that the students had reacted a bit better and thought that everything had gone fine, only to find out that I had just passed, and this time I had battled with stress for three days, and nightmares, and all that, convinced that it was a fail, when instead it would have been a merit, even. How can I be unbiased when it is me we are discussing?
Anyhow, lesson passed, fingers crossed for the assignment, since things seem to have changed at the DELTA, so the pub meeting we had scheduled after the session on Thursday, just to share some info that we may have learnt separately during out course, became instead a communal rant on what the hell is going on now. And the reason for this is that we ALL have to resubmit our experimental practice assignment, an assignment previously described as "impossible to fail". But what drives us mad is some of the criteria for this resubmission: in my case, just to mention one point, there is a comment that criticises my choice to submit the article in a format different than the original...Now, having submitted the assignment electronically, what was I supposed to do, buy a scanner, scan the article, and attach it??? And there are other idiocies like this, where fastidiousness seems to be the main criteria of evaluation. This is simply unacceptable, especially when we haven't really had much to work on in terms of instructions, and receiving feedback AFTERWARDS is not really useful, since, for example, in the case of the lessons, if something is wrong in a listening lesson I will probably not need to know it during a writing lesson, and so on. Shouldn't we rather have some more criteria on what will be judged in a lesson? Example two is the fantastic "whatever you do is wrong" point: S. spent an unplanned 3 minutes explaining a thing to a student during her lesson, thus responding to students' need. Wrong. A student in D.'s class asked a question and she decided to put the answer off to a later point in the lesson: also wrong, because she didn't respond to student's needs. So, what exactly are we to do?
Well, there are lots of things on our mind now, with LSA3 in a month, and the ongoing module 3 that is already causing problems (my bibliography contains books that I cannot find in the library, and the tutor must be mad if he thinks that I'm going to spend 200£ on books that I will use this once and never again; S.'s bibliography came on the day we were supposed to hand in the introduction...), so I must say that we are all pretty pissed off, and on the verge of a riot. Interesting, that's for sure.
In other news, blogspot is refusing to show me the font, which means that I cannot choose how the post will be published; at the same time, Word is refusing to let me copy (or cut) and paste my entries to the blog itself, which means spending hours writing online...so not good for my balance (the account balance, that is).
Well, more news to come: now back to the topic of my next observation, which is writing (speaking is too unpredictable). Oh, yes: we've just found out that LSA3, assignment and all, is going to Cambridge too, so that IS the lesson that we MUST pass, not just any internally observed lesson (as in, passing LSA1 and 2 was not that necessary then). Great. Anything else?
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