they're back!

...but not in vast numbers yet.  There have been a few pretty vague 'um, which building is this?' type enquiries which always amuse me, especially when they're from students on our own degree programmes who have nearly all their classes in this building... and the noise level has gone up, as has the queue for the photocopier.

I spent most of today finalising a syllabus, trying and failing to find last year's powerpoint for tomorrow's lecture (HOW do you lose a powerpoint?  Everything ELSE for the module was in the right set of folders...), writing a new powerpoint... and trying to resolve a timetable clash.  Which has come about because for some reason when the powers that be rescheduled one of the classes I had to cancel through illness back in December, they only checked against the other modules that I was teaching in December, not thinking that, oh, nearly ALL our modules are only one semester long so I might have a different set and thus different timetable in the new semester.  OOps!

Oh, and I finally got hold of copies of the teaching materials for last year's stats-for-beach-studies-101 (I teach what is essentially stats-for-beach-studies-102 this semester).  And yes, again, my dear colleague has cut more content out, so I get to rewrite 102 again... sigh... it's not a cosmetic change when you decide to drop all the compare-the-means type tests from 101, however much you might want to keep SAYING it is.

Whilst being interrupted.  I didn't miss the interruptions... Even if most of them were a grad student asking the same questions they ask every six months or so when they reach the end of an experimental run and need to set up the data for analysis... Why they can never read their own notes I don't know, but this was probably the fifth time of us spending the day getting increasingly frustrated with each other, me giving them very short answers - "separate out your response and explanatory variables" or "use the short codes" or "if the graph won't print directly, try the extract option" and the student longing for me to do it for them, but I'm NOT GOING TO.

Then home to prepare for tomorrow's seminar.  or, apparently, home to blog.  Much more interesting.