Been Fairly Busy Lately

Published on August 1, 2005 By chiprj In Blogging

As the title says, I've been fairly busy lately. I actually feel a bit guilty that 4/5 of the articles on my front page have to do with fantasy sports updates! That's just terrible, considering I post them about once a week. I have had plenty to write about. Just haven't.

I had duty over the weekend. I had planned on posting then, but when I got in the mood to type, my driver was trying to sleep and I didn't want the clickity-clak to be annoying, so I just read some stuff and commented here and there. Duty passed slowly but quietly. No real issues and that's all I can really hope for. I spent a good bit of Sunday sleeping it off, which in turn made sleeping last night difficult. Which in turn made me a bit sleepy this morning.

Normally, morning PT has a way of waking me up. But this morning, I had to take the first part of my annual retest for Korean. So, last night around midnight, I reached over and reset my alarm from 0440 to 0630, so I could try to get a little extra sleep before the test. I guess it helped some. I don't know how much more tired I'd have felt if I got up at the normal time, but I was still sleepy this morning.

The test went well. It seemed harder than it has in the past few years. It could be that teaching unit two and three Korean isn't really helping me prepare for my test. There were some passages where I wasn't sure of my answer and I couldn't remember what my "usual" fall back answers were. We've been using the same test now for over 10 years and I remember many of the answers before I hear the passages. There are new forms of the test out, we're just not giving the newer versions of the listening test to permanent party here yet. On Thursday, I'll be taking the reading test and that will be a newer form. Last year, I took the new form for the first time ever and scored a perfect 65, so I'm not really worried about it.

My primary source of busy-ness has been class. I'm supporting three classes right now. They are all small classes and two of them are sister classes and on the same schedule but they are taking up time. I spend a lot of time grading and preparing for class, but it seems that more time is being spent on dealing with individual students and their issues. The longer I'm in the Army, I'm finding the statement that "90% of your time is spent on 10% of your troops" to be very true. I spend a lot of my time dealing with a minority of the students, very often for the same thing I dealt with last week. We are quickly approaching the unit three test (also known as the house cleaning unit) and we may see some of these students leave for academic reasons, but the problem is, some should be pulled from the course for lack of effort. The units, though, are taking their sweet time and actually making counter accusations that the problem may not be with the student, but with the teaching team targetting poor performing students in an attempt to make them look bad and score an administrative withdrawal. See, academic pulls count against a team's stats on grad day (it's the fault of the teaching team because they can't teach effectively) but administrative pulls are not counted against a team (it's not the team's fault if a student requires knee surgery after a ruck march accident or if the student is a discipline issue). The units' concerns are vaild, but at the same time, so are ours. It can be frustrating to deal with a student repeatedly, over similar issues, weeks after said student was identified by both the school and the unit as a problem (and put on a suicide watch, to boot!). It's easy for the unit to keep the student in class, because we are a source of free daycare, if you will, instead of dealing with them while they wait for a recommendation from the doc and sloooooowly decide what to do. Eh, that's enough for now. I have a lot more to say, in generalities of course, about this and similar stuff, but this is all for now.

In addition to being busy at work, I'm still playing WoW. I am still really enjoying the game, but have been taking more time away from playing. I still play a lot, but now I do take entire evenings off! And, I also have fairly strict log off times. Some of the people I've met through the game have developed problems with finding time away from the game or have simply become burnt out. This is nothing new to the world of MMORPG gamers, but since this is my first MMORPG, I'm seeing it for the first time. Oddly, though, I've recently applied to join a raiding guild (if you know anything about MMORPG's, it's that raiding guilds are not generally a place where you find casual gamers) with one of my characters and have semi-retired all my other characters for the time being. While this guild does require active participation, I've found that their hours are pretty close to my own set limits and their active participation is also not over the limits I set myself for days away from playing. They have a fairly set schedule and I can generally play comfortably on the days they have big events set. It's a lot of fun to play with a large group of skilled players and play in an organized fashion.

Well, that's enough for now and should serve to put some fresh stuff on my blog that isn't related to fantasy sports!

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