flying by

time is going by so quickly i cant get a hold of things. i have been rubbish at keeping this blog up to date, but i dont even notice that weeks elapse without my writing something...i am juggling three jobs at the moment: the bookshop (which pays the bills) the teaching (which is supposed to be good experience) and now a researcher position at another london university. together they pay enough to survive on, but as usual the ones that interest me the most dont pay enough for me to do them exclusively.
to add to the confusion, my own work is done mainly in in serbian and russian, but the researcher position involves cuba and working in spanish. when i have to deal with both in the same day, i become vaguely incoherent, at least to myself.
today i struggled to get up and teach at 9am. the kids seemed in a fine mood: someone named "vanilla ice" signed the register and even drew a large erect penis on the said register for me to admire, presumably. apparently adolesence extends well into the late teens.
to be fair, the kids are not bad kids, most of them just dont want to be in my class at 9am, and i cant entirely blame them for that.they are generally decent, ignorant and very young. i have about 4 who are actually interested in the subject material, which is at least something. in a way, i sort of feel sorry for them. they come to university with all kinds of unfounded expectations, and instead of some wonderful educational experience they get the likes of me. one kid told me every single one of his class is with a phd student. of course we phds are not bad people, but it must be pretty annoying to pay a lot of money for university and not meet any real professors your first year. it also sends the loud and clar message that first year of university in england is a joke, you would have to work at it not to pass. the fact that real professors dont want to teach first year classes, and dump them on all the phds, is an indicator of the first years students last place position in the university priority list. i cant blame them if they get annoyed.