Sir Bob was wrong

The good news is that I don't have to teach discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication for at least another year. And that's assuming I'll still be here next year, and that I'll still be teaching English Language 1. If I'm not, I mightn't have to teach these things for even longer.

However, in general, Fridays are not very good days. They consist of a lot of running around. I'm teaching from 10 to 12, then there's the postgraduate lunch in Teviot (something that over a year into the project still doesn't want to take off, but we keep trying), and then there's usually a research group meeting of some description from 1 to 2. Which means that by the time I come to my office ready to actually do some work, I'm completely drained of energy, and like fuck am I going to start anything new.

Mondays, in comparison, are much better. Freshly re-energized from the weekend, I do not have teaching in the morning, and the fortnightly research group is at the sensible time of 3pm. Once you get back from that, there just is not really any time to start anything new anyway, so it's okay to just sit and answer some e-mails. So I actually quite like Mondays.

Not only Bob Geldof and his Boomtown Rats had the wrong end of the stick with their I don't like Mondays. It also appears that Fridays get a much more positive review in popular culture: I remember Friday on my mind by the Easybeats, and Friday I'm in love by the Cure. Of course this is not likely to be a representative sample of the weekday song population, but as it's a Friday afternoon, I'm really not going to research this in depth.

On average, though, this year's lot appears to be a bit more on the ball than last year's, although they may not necessarily speak a whole lot more. I'm also not sure of their ontheballness comes out of a general interest in the topic – I suspect this to be the case for some of them – or out of an obsession with high marks and wanting to know exactly what to say in an exam and how to say it, rather than wanting to understand what a phoneme actually is or what the point is of conversation analysis – I am quite sure a number of my kiddies fall into this category.

Do I know what the point is of conversation analysis? No. Do I care? Not really.

By this time last year, I had seven of my then first-years having befriended me on Facebook. One group even had a tutorial group reunion (well, the people that they could remember, anyway – and quite frankly, I had forgotten about a fair number of them as well) two weeks ago, for which I was invited as well. I had expected it to be slightly awkward, but it was actually quite good fun. This year, I have more students, but none of them have tried to befriend me on Facebook yet. There was a vague attempt in one group (the Thursday group) to have a tutorial outing, but that never got properly organized. There was mention of the Big Cheese though, so I'm not exactly sorry it came to nothing...

I'm looking forward to teaching starting again in the first week of next semester, with some interesting topics: social and geographical variation in English, and history of English. The days will be getting longer by then, so Fridays may no longer be as depressing.