(no subject)

[rhondacrockett]

Whoops. I figured I'd better show up here again and explain that I'm not dead. Travelling up and down to Belfast to take my classes and reading up for my viva has taken up my time.

My students are depressing me this year. None of them stand out for me. Last year my two Thursday groups were brilliant; the students were talkative and interested, and some of them came out with points I'd never considered. This year I get the impression that all of them are here because they couldn't be assed to get employed or go on the dole for three years. Which I suppose is hypocritical of me since that was one of the reasons I did a PhD (oh how I learned my lesson there!), but trying to engage students who don't want to be engaged is draining.

Part of the problem is the new way of taking attendance. Before, I had to do a roll call - very school-ish but it let me get to know my students, associate a name with a voice and face. This year, we have sheets which we hand round and the students sign in, then we hand the sheets in to the school office. No natural chance for me to join names with faces, which leaves me (never good with names and faces to begin with) with a class full of anonymous faces and a list of strangers' names.

The Wednesday morning class is particularly draining. I'm not much of a morning person and perhaps I should have known better than to put a class on so early. I still haven't had everyone turn up for that class; there could be people who are supposed to be in whose faces I haven't seen yet. And it's not like they were shoehorned into this morning class by administration; this year the students were allowed to pick which tutorial slot they wanted to go into. They decided that 10-11am would be suitable for them. *tears hair out*

On a different note: my sister (12) has got a hankering to go on Neopets. Considering the addictive qualities of Neopets and the fact that we only have dial-up, I'm sceptical about how practical this is. My mum, meanwhile, is worried about security and when I mentioned that I knew people who played Neopets, she wanted me to get some more details. Things like who knows or can access personal details, how players get in contact with each other, what these competitions and stuff is about. I've looked round the site myself but my mum prefers people feedback, which I understand.

Comments

[musewrangler.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It's been a few years since I was really active on Neopets, but I can tell you what I remember. There's a certain age cut-off (13, maybe?), and younger players are a little more restricted/protected in what they can do. The most important thing is for your sister to understand what sort of information she shouldn't be giving out online -- if she gets that, and if she's careful with things like passwords, she should be fine. I'd suggest she stay away from the message boards (they're moderated but full of morons), avoid the trading post, and perhaps turn off friending and neomails. There's plenty to do, even on a dial-up connection -- she can play games, train her pet, run a little shop, etc. Dial-up makes restocking rare items almost impossible, but there are plenty of other things to do. I never did much in the way of interacting (the site's just too full of mind-numbing idiots), but I still had a shop, played the stock market, fought in the wars, etc. ^_^