Back on the hamster wheel again

Last week, everything suddenly went mad as the new semester swung into gear. Current things on my plate:

• I’m currently occupying two double lecture slots on Monday and Tuesday mornings. This means preparation is eating my weekends, and I don’t feel good for much mid-week. My view of my performance thus far: ‘not great, but better than last year’. I’d probably be quite negative if I didn’t have last years’ for a reference point, but my pacing is much better this time round, and I feel that most of the time I’m being more coherent (though that remains to be proven…). I am, however, rueing the fact that my original plan to do some serious reading and rewriting over the summer fell by the wayside.
  
  
• Last week also saw the first arrival of mapping projects on my desk, as the efforts of the 3rd years I went out to Spain in July with were handed to me for preliminary marking. There’s not as many as last summer (thank goodness), and it was only field slips and notebooks at this stage. So, was any of the advice I’d given them was taken on board? Not as wholeheartedly as I would have liked – for example, while everyone had drawn boundaries on this year, a slight lack of thinking was indicated by the fact that they weren’t always sensible boundaries. Oh well, it’s a start; I’m meant to be supervising the write-up too, although if last year is anything to go by my services will only be called upon the day before the hand-in date, when it’s too late to help them.
  
  
• Somehow, despite not actually volunteering my services, I’ve found myself co-supervising a number of undergraduates whose research projects involve heavy use of the magnetometer, and consequently hand-holding by me. Since things I never agreed to do materialise on my desk with depressing frequency, I’m not overly bothered – I’ll save that for when I have to explain data analysis for the 27th time without any indication that the previous 26 attempts even registered.
  

Hmm, remind me again – I’m being employed as a technician, right?