December, how are you here?
Dec. 5th, 2019 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
graculusWe're pretty much at the end of the academic year and I suddenly realised that I haven't posted for 2 months, so here goes. Not that there's much to say, to be perfectly honest - life revolves around work, fencing and not a great deal else.
Work is going pretty well, though I've been very annoyed to have an observation which included our new quality assurance manager. She's full of all the usual QA buzz words and little else, from what I can see. Apparently they were happy with my lesson but still handed me a 16-point action plan, so I'm not sure I'm convinced. My manager also teaches one class and has been observed too, with apparent expectations that she's going to receive something similar from what she told me.
I'm teaching 3 classes, two at the same level and one supposedly the level below. Sadly the folks in the lower level are really only just at that level and not very strong at all, so it's a lot slower progress than it would otherwise be. Most of this term has been about boosting their confidence so they will try stuff that's harder as we go along and it takes a lot of energy on my part to do that. You also get folks who have hit a bit of a natural plateau and it's hard to see how to get them past that, especially if they can see they're stuck too.
This is going to be my last academic year of teaching Saturdays, as it's had too much of an impact on the competitions I want to do and I've done it for 4 years. I've also been teaching a class that's 12.30-3, so I have to have lunch at about 11.30 or starve, then another from 6-8.30, which means a late dinner. I very much like having a day off in the week, though I've not been very good at actually using it properly to do stuff. Maybe if I get my weekends back properly I can do something about that?
Fencing is going pretty well - I'm settled into a routine of fencing twice a week and have my competitions planned for the season. I'm currently comfortably in the top 200 in the country but you lose the points from the previous season after 12 months, so I need to do well in the next couple of competitions to maintain or even improve that. Another attempted routine thing is going to the gym to help with this. I was fencing a teenage lad last night and, while I could push him hard for a while at the beginning (and boy, he really didn't enjoy that!), I just didn't have the stamina to keep that level of intensity going for an entire fight.
Other than that, I've been reading a lot and watching a bunch of TV shows, while wondering how people manage to keep up with everything. Nothing that sparks any fannish desires, though. On Netflix, I'm currently watching a French show called Black Spot (Zone Blanche is the original title), where police procedures are just things that happen to other people, and a couple of Korean shows: Tunnel, about a detective who travels to the future to try and catch a serial killer, and Prison Playbook, about a baseball player who ends up in prison. The only downside with Korean shows is that each episode is movie-length and they usually have loads of them, partly because the pacing is quite slow compared to shows from the US or the UK.
I'll have to do a proper end of year post about TV shows, I think - there's been some really good stuff this year, with the highlights probably being Russian Doll (weird black comedy) and Kingdom (another Korean show, this time a historical one with zombies).
Work is going pretty well, though I've been very annoyed to have an observation which included our new quality assurance manager. She's full of all the usual QA buzz words and little else, from what I can see. Apparently they were happy with my lesson but still handed me a 16-point action plan, so I'm not sure I'm convinced. My manager also teaches one class and has been observed too, with apparent expectations that she's going to receive something similar from what she told me.
I'm teaching 3 classes, two at the same level and one supposedly the level below. Sadly the folks in the lower level are really only just at that level and not very strong at all, so it's a lot slower progress than it would otherwise be. Most of this term has been about boosting their confidence so they will try stuff that's harder as we go along and it takes a lot of energy on my part to do that. You also get folks who have hit a bit of a natural plateau and it's hard to see how to get them past that, especially if they can see they're stuck too.
This is going to be my last academic year of teaching Saturdays, as it's had too much of an impact on the competitions I want to do and I've done it for 4 years. I've also been teaching a class that's 12.30-3, so I have to have lunch at about 11.30 or starve, then another from 6-8.30, which means a late dinner. I very much like having a day off in the week, though I've not been very good at actually using it properly to do stuff. Maybe if I get my weekends back properly I can do something about that?
Fencing is going pretty well - I'm settled into a routine of fencing twice a week and have my competitions planned for the season. I'm currently comfortably in the top 200 in the country but you lose the points from the previous season after 12 months, so I need to do well in the next couple of competitions to maintain or even improve that. Another attempted routine thing is going to the gym to help with this. I was fencing a teenage lad last night and, while I could push him hard for a while at the beginning (and boy, he really didn't enjoy that!), I just didn't have the stamina to keep that level of intensity going for an entire fight.
Other than that, I've been reading a lot and watching a bunch of TV shows, while wondering how people manage to keep up with everything. Nothing that sparks any fannish desires, though. On Netflix, I'm currently watching a French show called Black Spot (Zone Blanche is the original title), where police procedures are just things that happen to other people, and a couple of Korean shows: Tunnel, about a detective who travels to the future to try and catch a serial killer, and Prison Playbook, about a baseball player who ends up in prison. The only downside with Korean shows is that each episode is movie-length and they usually have loads of them, partly because the pacing is quite slow compared to shows from the US or the UK.
I'll have to do a proper end of year post about TV shows, I think - there's been some really good stuff this year, with the highlights probably being Russian Doll (weird black comedy) and Kingdom (another Korean show, this time a historical one with zombies).
