Week 13

Time has flown. I of course have had to look forward to the end of course and plan what will happen for the last couple of weeks. When the week began, I could say that there were still three weeks left but the reality is that because of holidays lots of lessons will be missed. As mentioned before, it is clear that students feel a great sense of relief when they hand their essays over to me - they have worked hard on creating them and while they are in my possession for evaluation, students can let go of the responsibility and "take a breather". However, because I am so acutely aware of how little time there is left, I worked hard through the weekend to ensure that I could get all the essays back (at least those I had received on time) during the first lesson of the week. This meant that students only had the weekend to recover from the writing of the first draft. The ball was thrown back in their court and now they have to start worrying again. They may feel pressured by having to get their final draft in before their big Bayram but I hope that once they go home to their families and realise that they have no work from Comm 101 screaming to be done, they will appreciate that the final push was worth it in the end.

This week was another one of those busy weeks where I had to conduct compulsory tutorials, teach and grade late submissions. I haven't yet made a tally of who did and who did not attend a tutorial but there of course will be a few who will claim that they could not find a time to suit them. There were of course lots of slots on Monday and Tuesday that were never filled. I have also had students sign up for fifteen minutes before the deadline for submission of final drafts. I suspect that they haven't yet put two and two together and realised this but when they do and they try to book an earlier slot, they will of course be all filled.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I hope students can. There appears to be a few that can't. In fact there are a few that have fallen at the last fence. Some students appear to have just given up at the prospect of having to write the second essay. This is really a shame as they are so close to the end. One final push and they'd have it over with. However, they are now committing themselves to having to repeat the course next semester. Here's hoping it'll go well for them but from past experience I can only warn that because of how tired they'll be they may even have less energy next semester for jumping that last fence.