Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

We have an applicant for a teacher here on campus, who, just from the way she spoke, given that she was in her sixties and her voice was already constantly breaking, already irritated some of the people in the faculty.

On an aside, we did want the students playing old people in the recent school play to listen to her and get an idea how their voice could sound old and yet still carry to the corners of the room.

It doesn’t help that there is a certain tone in her voice that somehow expected to be obeyed. She was, after all, a former vice principal in another school.

The other day our secretary called her up about scheduling her teaching demonstration. She (and the other prospective professors) are in fact lucky that they are allowed to choose whatever topic they want to lecture about from the syllabus they are given some time beforehand.

I remember when I had to give my first teaching demo. I was only given one hour to prepare, and I had to choose the topic randomly from a box of folded papers that the chairman (oddly enough, the same chairman who is appointed again now) asked me to draw from.

But back to my original story: the secretary even asks them what visual aids they would be using for their lecture demo, whether an overhead projector, a whiteboard or a computer and a slide presentation.

Now this primadonna among educators says that she will be using the latter. She also says that she will be sending over the notes for her lecture to the secretary on a date sometime before her demo, and she expects it to be finished by the time of her scheduled presentation.

Wow, now I’ve heard that the teachers in our system are already considered spoon fed compared to other schools, especially in terms of computerized student lists, provided grading sheets and a comparatively streamlined process for changing of grades. I didn’t know the school’s reputation for coddling its employees had gone so far as that.

Maybe they even carried her around in a divan in her old school, and fed her grapes.

Onto other news: we have a seminar that we are supposed to go to for the software we are using in our Graphics One and Two classes, as part of the memorandum of agreement between the school and the programming company. It’s for three weeks, but it happens to be three weeks that includes the last two days of the regular term, the whole of the finals week, and course card distribution day.

Because of this we have pleaded to be excused from attending, but we have been threatened with breach of contract. In fact they have gone so far as to ask us to contact the other schools in the system just to fill up the needed five representatives for each specific application.

We have managed to limit our schedule to two weeks because the other applications are not relevant to our offered courses such as plant space allocation, architecture, civil engineering such as road (and raceway!) design, and structure integrity.

But at the very least we will be showing up for the first two days, which is a general forum and review of the software.

I’ll talk about how this all turned out next time. For now, class dismissed.