The End of Year 2

Wow, this is weird. I have now finished my second year at university, assuming I haven’t failed anything- which is extremely unlikely. The past week has probably been the most intense week of uni so far in terms of work.

Yesterday was a group maths presentation. Each group did theirs on one aspect of measure and ours was “volume and capacity”. As you can imagine, it was hardly the most interesting presentation to make. The assignment also involving doing a role play where someone played the teacher and the rest played schoolchildren. You can imagine the quality acting this involved by the people playing the schoolchildren. Fortunately I managed to avoid being in this ridiculous charade by being the narrator and saying all the important stuff. The two other presentations were both about “weight and mass” and were less than exciting to listen to. Apart from the bit where I estimated how much a bag of rice was knowing a potato was 370g. I wasn’t far off either. Our presentation was the worst of the three in our session but it seems pretty likely we’ll at least get a mark that is good enough to pass.

The second presentation of the day was history this morning. This was about organising a school trip and ours was about a submarine museum. This presentation was much better and I think ours was probably one of the best. It was also the one which produced the most laughs, which is probably not something to be proud of. One came when my team-mate said that you’d be “buggered” if you were claustrophobic and went on the tour of the submarine. And another came when I said “there was so much condensation the tins fell off the labels” and my other team-mate corrected me. How I managed to mess that up quite so much is beyond me.

And with those presentations done and my history essay handed in, uni is over for another year. That means I’m now half way through my course and in two years will be a qualified teacher. It’s both exciting and kind of terrifying as that once seemingly unreachable goal comes ever closer. What a year it has been. And I don’t really mean that in a good way. I had a fairly successful placement in school but I have lots to work on in that respect. My assignments have gradually improved and the written ones at least are now getting particularly good marks, though the elusive “first” has yet to be awarded to me. Socially it has been a complete disaster. For most of the year I barely even saw my housemates and even when I did there was various bits of animosity amongst them anyway. At least I sense things might be better next year in that respect. I’ve also hardly gone out socially either. I have only been to to student union nights this entire academic year, which is ridiculous.

That gives me all sorts of things to think about. I guess I have to come up with some goals for next year:

1. Be the best teacher I can be and end up with a report with little or no comment about my classroom presence (unless I get one that says it was amazing).
2. Concentrate more on reading and take books out early to hopefully one or several first class assignments.
3. Attempt to be  more social. Make some good new friends and go out socially more.

Well those three things are things I would like to have achieved in a year’s time. The social one especially is my biggest issue. Lately I’ve become more shy and socially awkward than I ever used to be and it doesn’t make me very happy. As much as I do like spending time on my own I’d love to do more fun things with fun people!

Speaking of which, my best mate Chris will arrive here in a few hours and all sorts of crazy stuff is going to go down. Tonight we’re finally going to see The Avengers and also go bowling and on Thursday we will go out and get drunk. It is going to be awesome. Hopefully. Due to that and the frustrating fact that I have no internet access at home means posts will be limited this week. Having no internet is horrible. Most of my housemates have gone home now so there’s no-one around and I have nothing to do. Without Chris visiting I would be really bored.

And on that note it’s time to end. I apologise for not having many good posts here lately but the last week and a bit has consisted of chocka-block presentation making and rehearsing and essay writing. The summer holidays have started though so its all fun from now on! See you soon!