an eventful semester

I’m disappointed I placed up two Friday Moments in a row last week as I had hoped to find time to blog on some interesting developments in between. I was looking forward to a relaxing week of light editing and perfume blending until a colleague of mine called me on Wednesday morning and appealed to me to take on some last minute extra marking.

We’re tutoring together in a large, 2nd-year course with around 500 students, 19 classes, with 3 other tutors. We’re the only two with previous tutoring experience and despite most of the other tutors being really hardworking and dedicated, there’s been one that’s caused my colleague and the lecturer a lot of grief. He’s travelled here on a working holiday and despite being quite eager to land himself lots of jobs, he’s been extremely unreliable. Apparently, he frequently skips meetings at the last minute, after they have already been rescheduled just for him, and in the previous week, failed to turn up to his first class and asked my colleague to take it for him on 5 minutes notice, forcing her to miss her own Law classes. We were supposed to have finished marking these essays by this Thursday, but when my colleague called him on Wednesday just to touch base, he confessed that he barely made a dent in his 75 essays and didn’t intend to finish.
When my colleague looked through the few that he had marked, she couldn’t bear the thought of giving them back to the students because the comments would be sloppy and vague, like, “Good you talked about that, but could have done more.” He awarded one student a whopping 90/100 (a mark usually reserved for the very, very talented and diligent) and his feedback was that it was simply “the best essay” he has read “on this topic so far”. When my colleague read the student’s essay, she couldn’t even justify awarding her a mark higher than a 74.

I’m so saddened by stories of incompetent tutors like this. A university plays such a crucial role in education, yet its recruitment system allows almost anyone willing and available, to earn $80/hour with full autonomy and zero supervision. Despite this, I have so many friends who would love to be a university tutor, but talk themselves out of applying simply because they don't believe their pass degrees are good enough.