Academic woes

University right now is eating my life. I’m teaching a tutorial for the first time and it’s a nightmare. We have a new lecturer who does the introduction to the Middle Ages and I’m really not getting along well with her style of teaching. Neither do the students. Which results in massse of questions, important things are left unexplained and students are expected to teach them themselves. Which is a bit much, considering these are freshers and most of the things are theological or relate strongly to the medieval mind set. It takes a while to adapt to these things, and most of the students neither had much teaching on the middle ages in high school nor do they care about it. Still, if they want a chance to pass the exams, they can’t simply study facts and numbers, they need to understand how things relate. So the 90 minutes I teach every week are filled with questions, and I try to explain and relate things as well as I can. Since I’m still a student myself, eventhough advanced compared to those whom I teach, I’m constantly afraid to make mistakes.

Besides, I had to abandone my planned thesis topic and am now searching for a new one. While I might have found something that really interests me, there is the problem that our library does not really provide much material on the topic. Now I need to figure out whether I can get everything I need by inter-library loan or whether this would get too complicated. So there’s basically a lot on my plate right now, that keeps me out of the blogging world, eventhough I still read, but rarely comment these days.

This being said, I’d like to ask those of you who do come here every now and then: would you care to read a bit more about my feats at university? I’m a major in medieval history and have two minors, politics and english literature. I’ll be writing my thesis next term and after that, it’s final exams. I’ll try to get into a PHD program for medieval history in Great Britain or the US after that. So these would be the things mainly adressed within my posts on academia.

I’ll also try to come back to fashion and food within my next posts.  I really miss writing about these things, but atm, I just can’t get my head around much else but university related things.

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