I asked the 3 people who were “co-teaching” my 3 courses with me the same thing.
“At the end of the semester, please send me the students’ grade for the lab.”
“Just the lab grade? Do you also need the number of the minutes they spent at the lab or the attendance sheets for the conversation group?” the instructors asked.
“No, just give me the grade, that’s all I need.”
To be on the safe side, I also sent the same short and seemingly simple request by email.
So how many of the instructors, do you believe, sent me the lab grade?
One.
The other two sent me a mountain of useless information which contained everything in the world except the lab grade. What is worse, the information they sent me was not conducive to figuring out the lab grade.
So I asked for the lab grade again. And again. In response, I got the lab minutes, the conversation group attendance, and God knows what else.
The only thing I didn’t get was the lab grade.
We keep complaining about our students’ incapacity to follow simple instructions but teachers are not much better.
P. S. If you are an academic, never consider going into administration. You will lose your faith in humanity and become bitter and cynical. People are great until you don’t have to supervise them.
Clarissa's Blog 
There is also a regrettable tendency to take the best academics and put them in administrative jobs so students are deprived of their teaching. It has happened to several people I know, and is very sad.
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Why those fucktards were hired?
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Mind you, this is the only thing they had to do in six weeks.
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I’m supposedly a bad teacher and I would never do stupid stuff like that.
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Even as a TA, I would never do stupid stuff like this.
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Clarissa, sorry if this is a bit off topic, but do you find it hard to directly transition from language to language? I seem to have no problem switching from English to Spanish and back again, but today I was reading a book in Czech and then watching a telenovela immediately afterward and it took a while (maybe a minute?) for my brain to start understanding the Spanish. Does anything like this happen to you? My Czech is pretty dismal (almost non-existent), maybe that has something to do with it.
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Yes, it definitely does happen. With me, what gets impacted the most is the pronunciation. I can’t transition from one language to another without developing a much stronger accent than I normally have.
Also – and this is a bit weird – if I read, say, in English and then begin to speak in Spanish, this impacts my pronunciation in Spanish. I don’t pronounce words in my head when I read, so I don’t know why this happens.
The grammar doesn’t get impacted when I switch between languages. The sentence structure does. And the intonation is impacted a lot. The intonation is always the hardest thing for me to master in a language.
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Transitioning from one language to another strengthens your Ukrainian accent? I’m glad it’s not just me that has a bit of kerfuffle between languages!
I know you mentioned this in passing before…something about different personality traits being expressed by one person when that person speaks a different language? Could you expound on that a little bit? Did you do a post about it and I missed it? I am terribly interested.
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“I was reading a book in Czech and then watching a telenovela”
For a moment I thought you meant a Czech telenovela. I don’t know about the current state, but in the bad old commie times the Czechs made the best tv series in the east block and a lot of them are on youtube.
Hospital on the edge of town was the most famous:
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Cliff Arroyo – This is fascinating. I had NO idea that this existed! I’m afraid my Czech is not even close to being good enough to follow this, though. I know a lot of elderly people in nursing homes that would really appreciate seeing something like this…and being able to watch a show that’s in their native tongue. I don’t know many young people who speak Czech.
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