My Head is Spinning

I have spent the last two days in this room, marking assignments. About seven hours yesterday, and another ten today.

Trying to be consistent and fair is a difficult task, and it becomes more difficult as the hours go by.

Now I feel drained. It's an emotional process. I worry if very poor work is produced by a student who doesn't care, or if they will be devastated when they get their result. I am upset when a student has completely missed the point of the questions. Was it a language problem? Why didn't they ask for assistance or clarification? Why didn't they even discuss it with a friend and thus discover they were wrong? And then I get angry at students who don't seem to have put much effort into it, but ask that they be marked leniently.

I'm glad it is over. (Almost, anyway. I have one more to mark which has such major problems I don't know how to approach it.) Of course, once the students get their results, there will be requests for re-marking. Sometimes that is wishful thinking on their part, sometimes there are mistakes in the marking. We are all human.

Spring in May

In June last year I commented that my jonquils seemed to bloom earlier every year, and here they are even earlier this year:

Preservation

Because it was a special day, I got to do whatever I wanted today. I chose a trip to the zoo.

I hadn't yet seen the baby elephants, even though they are a couple of years old.

Fortunately they take a while to reach full size, so they are still obviously young and quite cute.

After a lovely day enjoying the animals and the gardens, it was home to dinner and some cake:

Waverley

Took a train to Mount Waverley to see the Waverley Patchworkers quilt show at the Waverley Community Centre.

This lovely purple achillea is in the garden of the community centre.

The show was interesting and worth seeing if you can get there tomorrow. 

I bumped into a friend there who offered me a car ride home.

But the heavy traffic and the rain made the trip a little less pleasant than on the train.

Here Comes The Tram

Alone on the tram stop as I head home after my last day of work in the city.

For now?
For ever?

Yum!

A surprise "thank you" gift from a friend.

Bee Workshop

This morning I attended an interesting bee-keeping workshop at Bee Sustainable in Brunswick. There's always new things to learn, and today as well as getting some ideas for preventing a repeat of last year's swarms, we prepared frames for the hive.

This is a very handy jig for stringing wire through the frame to hold the wax foundation.