End of semester craziness!

The last week of the semester was so crazy that Hannah and I barely had any time to breathe!... We had to finish ALL the markings for the lab because the students are taking their tests earlier this year. It is the school's policy that the students have all their assignments marked and results entered in Cecil for them before their tests.

On top of that, I also have to leave for Taiwan for my research on Sunday (8 June) which means I have no wiggle room in terms of any time left. Besides getting all the assignments marked, I have to get ready all logistics, which includes getting the school's computer, loggers etc ready for Taiwan. And as always, I am nervous and worried about leaving Hannah alone at home.

Before I leave, I also had to mark 67 essays for this course - Marine202. This is one course which I did not enjoy tutoring. The reason is not only am I being paid demonstrator's rate (which is very low) for doing my coordinator's work, the course itself is not challenging. As such, the students did not really put in much effort. They just want to pass the course, and they can easily do so. For example, they would pass the essay if they just put in all the graphs that are required... do not need to worry about writing proper results, or discussion, much less about proper sentence structure and grammar!

I just arrived in Taipei yesterday. I planned to finish my paper writing before I go to the field to conduct my experiment next week, follow by the Asia Pacific Coral Reef Symposium. After returning from the conference, I will have 3 weeks to finish my DNA samples and send it off for pyrosequencing, and also getting the other samples ready for metabolomics analyses. (Disclaimer : thus there may be more mistakes than I like in this post!)

Here is a picture I took from one of the student's essay. He cited me in his reference (on how to write a paper). Too bad, he DID NOT learn anything from that presentation, and he did really badly for the essay (I marked his paper, meaning he citing me has not make me gave him any preferential treatment).

Marine 202 field trip

FINALLY! The last field trip of the semester! I was demonstrating for Marine 202 field trip this weekend. Luckily the weather was great! It was a bit cold, but at least we were dry :) The students were doing cockles (Austrovenus stutchburyi) count along the muddy coast of Whangateau Harbour, to determine the density and size of the cockles distribution. There was a mass mortality of cockles in early 2009, and thus they were doing surveys to see if the population has recovered. After this trip, they would have to write a scientific report of the data they collected. Hanieh (another demonstrator) and I are in-charge of marking their papers this year.