Procrastination and insanity

I'm back - from a neuro assignment, 2 exam equivalents, marking 50 tests and 50 essays, a 5 day hike and a semi-comatose post-hike sleep.

The end of October and the beginning of November were utterly mad. I had to write a critical analysis of a journal article for my neuropsychology course and ended up being 27% over the word limit and unable to edit anything out. Eventually I just handed it in out of sheer desperation - and was quite relieved when my lecturer took mercy on me and gave me a first, despite my blatant disregard for the word limit of the assignment. While doing the assignment, I also had to mark first year tests and essays, which resulted in quite a bit of insanity. This had a lot to do with a student who had written her essay as a story ("in 1999, lots of people knew about HIV..."), the complete lack of referencing, my inability to give students a first for writing a comprehensible essay and not suspect that the whole thing was plagiarised and the bizarre mention of people being used as "excape goats" in 1 test that I marked. HOMSI found the whole thing hilarious and really enjoyed reading some of the tests (or trying to, given the general bad handwriting trend). I also use him as a testing mechanism for spelling - i.e. if my dyslexic boyfriend can correctly spell a word used in an essay, when a student using MS Word and a spellchecker cannot, I feel entitled to make a comment about spelling in said essay.

After the marking it was onto my 2 exam equivalents. 1 was a mini research project. Luckily, I only needed to make minor corrections from my first draft and handed in a few days early. the neuro exam equivalent was far from friendly, however, and I ended up reading tons of journal articles until my mind was filled with information on the neuropsychological effects of HIV. Somehow, all the articles seemed to cite one another and it felt like I was going around and around in circles. I finished the exam at 10:25 on Friday, 5 November, and HOMSI arrived at 10:30 to repack my backpack and pick me up for the hike.

The hike itself was awesome and deserving of its own post, which will follow shortly, along with some of the 300 photos that I took. After 6 days away, it was bizarre to be back in Johannesburg and general civilisation and I've been having serious withdrawal from not being on top of a mountain or walking through a forest. I also ended up invigilating a 3 hour exam the day after we got back from the hike. After 5 days of walking, my feet were far from impressed about having to walk for another 3 hours!

The past few days have been fairly uneventful. HOMSI and I went to the zoo with Sarah, Graham and baby Joshua on Sunday, which was lovely, and then we had lunch with my parents for my mom's birthday. My work ethic seems to have died a slow and painful death, mostly thanks to John van de Ruit's book "Spud". In desperation, I stopped nagging myself about working and finished the book last night, just so that I'd no longer have any excuses about not working! I'm holding off buying the other books until my MA is done!

And now I'm off to sort out some stuff for my research, which really, really, really needs to get going! Happy Thursday!