(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

Spent half my workday trying to unearth the attendance for a course where a teacher had made pretty much every mistake it is possible to make. It was more like forensics than administration.

I won't bore you with the specifics, except to say that part of the task involved reconstructing the hours during a pay period from secondary sources, to see if a particular page had ever actually existed or not.

The experience probably rendered me very slightly hysterical, because when I finally sat down to write the report card, and saw the teacher's notes, I couldn't stop laughing for five minutes.

See, under "Course Content," we usually get a list of grammatical structures studied or activities done. More verbose teachers will list every single verb tense, while the terser ones just mention things like "simple past and present, all forms."

This teacher felt only two items were relevant for a 70-hour, 6-unit course:

1. "discussed the difficulties of getting used to a new pet."
   
2. "talked about the relative merits of nigh owls and early birds."

"Nigh owls," by the way, was her mistake, not mine. Yes, it was a spelling mistake on an English report card.

And I know what she meant, of course, but I couldn't help but wonder what a "nigh owl" would be. All I could think of was "Repent sinners, for the owl is nigh!"

Comments

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the offer of the blanket, but I've got quite a few right now -- more than I use ^_^

But I think data entry is difficult no matter where you're working. Problem is, people think data entry clerks are just being anal when they ask for details, and meanwhile someone on the other end is freaking because they don't have the information.

We don't ask for gender on any form, which I usually think of as enlightened -- except when I suddenly have to write a report card for someone's employer from a teacher's rough notes, and don't know whether to use "he" or "she."

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

We only really need gender because we are running a "hotel" of sorts in the summer, and most conferences would pop a sprocket if we gave them co-ed suites. (The rooms here are meant for four people, two rooms of two, in each suite that shares a bathroom. They're indescribably tiny. In a suite by myself gives me perhaps the space of a SMALL studio apartment.) Thus, when we get a roster that involves a lot of names the staff has never seen before, like "Ad" and "Neeltje", everybody flies into a panic. I just last night got a batch of cards for a conference of mathematicians and much of the paperwork has panicked pen scrawls on it because nobody could figure out whether two of the names (one Chinese, one [Asian] Indian) were male or female.

Being not a complete 'tard, at least not yesterday, I figured anybody going to a mathematical conference was probably a mathematics professor somewhere. Five minutes and GoogleFu gets me their CVs, which say they're male. Why nobody else did this, I have no idea.

[Interesting email alert that was, on this comment -- forget to log out our housemate first, did we? ^^;; I was confused for a minute or two...]