Louise's thoughts

Teaching

This week is in fact Easter break, which means that only PhD students and young vibrant assistant professors are here at the university. It gives an extra upbeat notion of energy around, one that is usually outweighed by older administrative women and secretaries who dominate the lunch hour with kids/garden/cooking talk. That means that I am actually joining people for lunch this week; we are free to talk about research, annoying students and cool gadgets. Another bonus is that there are only few students around (for my American readers, that means master students, PhDs are a special breed here) leaving hallways vacant for yelling and screaming obscenities to each other, which we ordinarily wouldn't because we have to keep our cool attitude. I mean, perhaps you will be advising a student who heard you yell 'Well, screw you too, I am writing that paper anyway, you have no right to tell me that my research methods are not genuine!', but the odds this week are significantly lower than usual. And I have to admit that I havn't been yelling that much yet, because my head is buried in teaching.

Before going to Irvine last August, I made this 'deal' with my real adviser (who has no idea that I am writing a blog and I prefer to keep it that way) that if I turned in my thesis this summer, he would let me off the hook when it came to teaching. No more teaching, just a thesis. But Damn you Paul Dourish for making Irvine such a fun place to do research and somehow I ended up in this twisted plot where the only way they could get me back (I know it, they know it, we just don't talk about it) was to make me teach and I now have 40 students to advise through April and May in location-based mobile application design. I usually think students are these adorable, curious, generally hardworking entities and I love to help them out but this time it is a little different. They take my precious time away from me and I am living off extensions right now (‘sorry, I promise I will hand in that position paper by the end of the week’). The only good thing is that their projects are actually interesting, dealing with topics that are my interests as well. Some wants to make a city guide with shopping and mapping and although it has been proposed before, it is always good to see a new version, with different locating technologies (I need to explain to them that GPS is neither plausible nor appropriate on cell phones right now...).

So even though it is Easter, I will be right here at my desk, wondering when I get the time to write on my thesis. I don't know if it was a relapse of my jetlag or the impact of last night's hot date that kept me from sleeping more than 4 hours last night (again!), but somehow I have the feeling that I will not get much more the next couple of days. As one of my fridge magnets says: ‘Coffee, you can sleep when you are dead’.