Random School/Work-Venting Post

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Oh dear, I and a friend met with another ex colleague from my former company and after a lot of scary stories we ended up drinking a toast on cynicism, and the other ex colleague just didn't quite get why. Nice guy. He's too good for this world. Too sad. I wish him all the best.

 

My main job's a great place to meet people who quite don't fit in anywhere else, or just regular blue and starry-eyed folks with bleeding hearts....


edit: just a little surgical removal of some not-that-questionabe material, but there it went lest my colleagues might sneak a peek over my shoulder...

 

Today I was attending a mini research convention at my faculty.
A few of the papers were pretty cool. I like hearing about new and different things.
However, after listening to 5 (five!) papers involving mice on benzodiazepines running through mazes, 4 different tablet degradation studies, and 3 lectures on antimicrobial properties of blackberry juice I seriously started to question sanity (mine or theirs).
Especially since I was there to present a synthesis research I'm a part of.

My own work is far from brilliant, but some of the others had no point, whatsoever. I mean, why would you want to test the flouride levels in bottled water? Why? It has a certificate, for crying out loud.

Anyway, I'll probably regret half this post tomorrow morning, but I'm just grumpy for having spent eight hours preparing a lecture (.ppt, abstract, statistics, library dig) which lasted eight minutes (not to mention five months of laboratory work prior to it), only to realize that releasing rats into a maze for five days was a perfectly acceptable research paper.

Still, I wouldn't change my lousy 15% RCM yield for five such papers combined. At least. this feels like science.

 

The idiot struck again at work today...I was rostered in for a 3hr shift at 1130am and then a 4.5hr shift at 5pm....then at 2pm I was told to come back an hour and 15mins early

Then I find out that I wasn;t going to be working where I thought I would be, rather I'd be working where I KNEW I'd end up finishing well past my rostered finish time....too bad I'm too nice to let them know how p'd off I was...so once more a simple 7hr work day turned into a near-10hr day

 

I love my temp job at the library, no stress, no waiting for the hammer to fall. No competition or popularity contests.

Whereas my other workplace can be a bit...well, there's some people who're hanging on tooth and nail to their positions and the status they've gained. No need to mention that this, well to me at least is quite stressing...

 

I need a vacation.

I've got 70 hours of vacation time accrued, but that's only 6 days off...and the way things are sounding now, I'm going to need all those hours for this summer.

The crummy thing is, since I've been working for my company for less than 5 years, I only accrue 2.3 hours a week...

 

So, I did a bit of scouting, and unless I feel like wasting another three years of my life in college plus the time I need to complete the insane requirements (for public college), or somehow align 15 grands for private... there's just no way I'm specializing in networking, and I have better aspirations than working at minimum wage in a computer shop building boxes. Hell, the senior tech at my old workplace worked there for SEVEN years and is paid $13 an hour!

The time to fool around is done -- I'm dropping by the place that offers the welding PSD with my little brother, as he wanted to take the course too, and there's a very good chance I'll end up doing the course.

 

Oh yeah...I forgot this thread was for ranting about school too.

Well, as some of you know, I applied for a base level machine maintenance position at my work. I've got a 25% chance of getting the job, but if I don't, I've decided that once I graduate, I'm going to try to get in to the University of Utah (the biggest university in the state), so I can get a second bachelor's degree, or possibly a master's degree. My work is paying 100% so I figure I might as well take full advantage of it...that way I can also continue getting the tax benefits.

The question is, what do I want to get? I might be motivated to go for a Masters Degree in Electronics Engineering...but that would require a lot of trigonometry and calculus...and I'm really struggling in my "intro to calculus" class... However, I might be able to get a second Bachelor's Degree in Electronics Engineering since the uni has a different accreditation... If that was possible, it would be like a 4 year review of everything I’ve already learned, which would be fun.

I wish my work would pay for flight school.

 

OK, I need to vent. I teach a class at a local community college for recent adult immigrants. I instruct them in English as a Second Language. We do both grammatical analysis (circle the nouns and underline the verbs in the following sentences) and conversational English (You are the employer, your friend is the guy looking for a job. Role play the conversation.)

This program is funded by my province. These students get 30 months of instruction to help them find employment. The students get PAID to do this. Admittedly, it's not a huge amount of money, but I've looked at their cheques. They have enough to live on, especially if they take a part time job after school. Many of them do, and it is permitted under the terms of the contract they sign.

My problem? There are several students who don't have any interest in learning English. Nor do they have any respect for Canadian culture and values. They do not practice English, they make no effort to improve, and you can tell by the way they treat others that they truly believe they are superior to the average Canadian citizen. Of course, they're not so superior that they have a problem taking our money and living on it.

A larger portion of the students are decent, hardworking people who are using this opportunity to better themselves and learn how to integrate into Canadian culture without losing their cultural identity. I know one woman with 3 jobs! SHE'S the kind of immigrant we need in this country.

A few rotten apples spoil the whole barrel, I suppose, but it just really gets my goat when the whole staff here breaks their necks to help these people and some of the students act like it's their God given right to suck taxpayer money without any intention of ever contributing to society.

Please note I'm not painting all immigrants with the same brush here -- there are lots of hardworking immigrants that I have in my class and that I know socially. As I said earlier, THEY are the kind of people we should let into the country.

I need to go take a boxing course or something. It's help me burn off some energy.

 

Sh**, damn, and crap! Hmmm...perhaps I should start trying harder, people with a MS in Electrical Engineering make good money.

As manufacturing jobs start relying more and more on robots than on people, there will always be a need for people to fix those robots.

 

I finally got a stable teaching job two months ago and I am now officially a teacher. Sadly I am an English teacher, one part of me thinks it was great that I decided to pick up English as my secondary subject as it is what gave me my current job and another part is dying a little bit inside when I feel compelled to teach the pupils countable nouns, irregular verbs or the difference between adjectives and adverbs. That is not what I want to do as a teacher.

The other downside is that the person who is supposed to be my closest collegue and whom I share the lower English education with is a total bitch. I am not kidding, she is the bitchiest person I have ever encountered. I do not know if she feel threathened by me or if that is just how she is to everyone but she is doing her best undermine me and patronize me and whatnot. I do not pay too much attention to her and from what I gather from the rest of the faculty she generally treats everyone like that. We have completely different pedagogical philosophies so I am looking forward to an interesting year after the summer.

Anyone have any ideas on how to handle a super bitch who you more or less have to work together with some way or another. I work at a school that in many ways is similar to the place LKD works, immigrants learning Swedish makes up the largest chunk of students and then there is a programme for youths who for some reason screwed up their compulsory education and now need to straigthen themselves out to be able to get into any upper secondary level education and thats where I share the English education with the Wicked Witch of the West. We are supposed to work together but I just can't see it happen.

ps. It really sucks writing posts on an Internet forum when you have told people you are an English teacher, you have to actually pay attention and focus so you don't make too many language errors.

 

Smackdown! Catfight! Roowwrrr! Get down and dirty and tumble dry!

So...ideas, yeaahss...good ones? Nah.

 

Ignore her, completely and utterly.
Good day and good bye basis, nothing else. Be polite, since showing animosity will most likely make the situation worse, but be cold and not interested in anything she has to say. She'll most likely stop bugging you.

Or you could spray her with holy water... that might help.

 

Well, I do not only have to work alongside her. I kinda have to work with her, I think. Guess we could just divide the kids in half when we get them next autumn and then never speak again.

 

Sh**, damn, and crap!

I didn't get the maintenance job I put in for. No news on who did get it. I had a feeling that I wasn't going to get it...it sucks when you're right.

 

Ok, this has been long time coming, but joacqin, I know that splitting kids in half is almost every teacher's dream. Still, don't do it.

Or if you do, buy a katana and read a little Samurai Executioner for reference. You can always go on about it in a cool-ish way...

 

B- and B+ on two essays. What, no A's?!

Two more essays due within weeks; multitude of assignments notwithstanding. A student's work is never done.

And after that, it'll be exams. Happy happy joy...