Sometimes I really do wonder where the camera is concealed

email from student, slightly edited:
 

hey jayn,
i'm a bit confuzed abt the write up do we just hand in the write up and if so is that the bit on the sheet that said write up  and if so why did you tell us to waste class time filling out the expt table if we just give in the write up. 

Stu xx

Why does their name get a capital letter and not mine?
Are the 'x's symbolic of the students' screwed-up eyes as they await with trepidation my riposte?
What did Stu believe they would be writing up if not the results from the experiment, as collated in the experiment table?

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Short note left on my door.

4pm. I'm here your not.

Unsigned.  Mysterious.  Handwriting about 85% chance female.  No appointments in the diary, no emails.

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Colleague X: Have you seen the note on Very Difficult Colleague's door?  Do you think he means it?
Me: what note?
X: it says "back next year"
Me: yeah, I think VDC had a conference somewhere expensive and decided to tack on a Christmas holiday
X: but for a whole year??  How can he afford it?
Me: X, when does next year start?
X: um, in a year's time ::looks at me as if I am very dumb::
Me: Try January 1st.
X: Oh... oh, yes, it's December, isn't it? You think VDC will be back in January?
Me: I expect so
X: If that's what they mean it's what they should write!  Students might be confused by it!

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Incoming (to Committee Meeting): So, tell me if you think this is a terrible idea, but I think we should do flargle.
Committee (severally and together): that's a terrible idea! ::explanations follow as to why it won't work - among other things, it requires changing all timetables for one week::
Incoming: Great, we're agreed, we'll try flargle in January!  We'll just cancel all the classes that week instead of rearranging the timetable, then rebook them
Committee ::grinds teeth::

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We have a small mathematical problem right now.  If you have 90 students, you could have all 90 in one module, or you could offer them three options, say, of 30 students.  That means 1 module versus 3 modules.  Incoming insists that this saves two modules worth of work. 

However, say that in the workload model, we count time spent in class (say 20 hours for each module), time preparing for class (say another 40 hours), time in class for each repeat of practical classes needed (for convenience, suppose that of the 20 hours, 10 are practicals, and the practical class can seat 30 students), and time for grading (1 hour per student per module). 

One module with 90 students therefore  'costs' 20 (classes)+40(prep)+20 (2 practical repeats) +90 (grading for 90 students) = 170 hours

One module with 30 students costs 20+40+30 = 90 hours.
 And therefore three modules with 30 students costs 270 hours.

The difference is therefore 100 hours, or roughly one module of savings, not two.  Plus you have less happy students (students like to feel they have a CHOICE of modules, 90 students is large enough to feel a bit invisible) and less happy staff (grading 90 of the same thing is more of a pain than grading 30 of this and 30 of that and 30 of the other, plus large classes involve a lot more paperwork and students are less happy and you know them less well).

Incoming doesn't seem to understand that grading increases with class size, and so do lab repeats.  His solution of 'get a bigger lab' is not a solution unless we also start having TAs to support the labs (at the moment most labs are taught by academics alone, or with one grad student as support) and all the lab equipment needed (3 lots of 30 students is less efficient in time than 1 lot of 90, but the 3 lots of 30 only require equipment for 30 at a time... so adding 60 extra sets of supplies and two TAs eats into your saving on staff time...).  And he can't work out why we keep being "so negative" about his suggestions...