A moan!

Oh what a beautiful day! But I am not going to get out there as there are copies to grade and marks to get ready.

Lots of people think that being a teacher is just so easy, we've all spent years in classrooms and think we know it all. YOU KNOW NOTHING! How do you think you get your grades, by magic? No! By the time you teachers took outside class looking over, grading and correcting your work after school, in the evenings, in the mornings during the weekends! That is when your work is looked at. For one hour your teacher spends with you he has already spent probably a good couple of hours thinking about, preparing your class and correcting your work. He spends a good hour and a half outside the classroom for every hour he spends with his students. Then there are the meetings, the administration, the emails and so and and on, and for all of that I get 2000€ a month, oh but of course... there is the satisfaction of the job.

Enough! All of this is because I work for the University of Lyon 1, Claude Bernard, who have not paid its part-time teachers yet this academic year. That means that I have been teaching students at university since September 2009 and not had a penny yet! Is this really a way of treating teaching staff? What would happen if doctors, politicians, policemen were not paid - we would soon find that life would not be easy to live and yet we, the teachers, go on taking the whipping year after year after year! LET'S DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Teachers at University of Lyon 3 refused to give in their marks, this annoys the administration is not good for the students and got little or no press coverage. LET'S UNITED and DO something for vacataires here in France, le berceau de democracie!!

Getting started

It is not always as easy to start. Rather silly and naive way to start this blog but it has just taken me about 10 mins to get into this blog because usually I am connected to gmail and so don't have to bother putting in all the ids and so on. Anyway I am here and so shall stop this ranting.

While listening to the radio, France Inter, I heard about a BBC documentary on the net and so quickly went to the BBC site where I couldn't see the videos as I am out of the UK. Thank heavens for other means, as it has given me the opportunity to have a look at the first part of the series which I have found really interesting. I am only a layman and so it appealed to me. Perhaps someone a little more erudite and educated would find it a little superficial but I have learned quite a lot this evening which I hope to pass on to my students at some time. By the way the series is called 'The Virtual Revolution'.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/

Have you heard about 'The Well'?
Do you know the difference between the internet and the WWW?
Who invented the WWW?
Have you heard about Ushahidi?
What about 'The Huffington Post'?

Have a look on the net, the web, it is so interesting, no, really.

Valentine's Day!!

Well, here I am in Budapest! What a journey to get here. Of course the day that I decide to come, there seems to be nothing but snow falling from Switzerland to Hungary and I had decided to come by car.

I no longer have a car. Accident in Austria, but I am alive and well. I suppose that is good news.