Lost and found

Hurry and kill the fatted calf (or, preferably, hunt down and slaughter a nice piece of tofu), for my tutorial was lost and has returned!

It turns out the whole thing was a big, messy, financially-motivated misunderstanding. Which is a bloody good thing, because it was getting very awkward having to cope with all the sympathetic looks I was getting and murmurs of "Hey, I heard about your tutorials," without letting my big internalised sulk make a break for daylight.

Newly Graduated Student (NGS) came to see me today and explained that, while she had requested to teach four courses, she was really hoping to teach one of these in another subject, which was closer to her specialty area. She had even wrangled the agreement of the course convenor, and was on the point of signing a contract, when lo! she received a visitation from a wrathful deity who did point out that, since we are paid extra for the first tutorial in each subject and less for each subsequent "repeat", NGS was committing grievous budgetary sin to even think about teaching only one class in a subject.

So this vengeful deity then organised for NGS to do four classes for Intro instead of three for Intro and one for the other course, but organised this without consulting NGS. Who for reasons best known to herself would prefer to teach only three classes in total if she can't do one in her preferred subject.

At this point I threw up my hands in disbelief at how complicated this was getting, eeped loudly when I realised said hands had still been holding a cup of hot coffee, mopped that off my trousers as best I could, and asked NGS nicely to go and sort out her schedule with HOD (who has now stopped wearing his vengeful deity hat) and ScaryLecturer, as well as the administrator who, poor woman, has had to prepare three different versions of my contract.

The upshot of it all is that I have my three classes back, NGS has her three, and everybody is happy except my trousers.

Technorati tags: academia, teaching