Death is a sure thing…

Yesterday at 9:40am my maternal grandmother passed away. It wasn’t a total shock to me (although I was stunned for a few moments) because she had been hospitalised for a week. Last Thursday she was warded at University Hospital (Pusat Perubatan Universiti Malaya) and she never left the hospital until her final breath. But I am happy that I got to care for her on one of the nights she was hospitalised and I got the chance to apologise to her for all my wrong doings. I am also happy that she passed away peacefully and with ease. I pray that she will be peaceful in the afterlife and is happily reunited with my late grandfather.

Semoga Allah mecucuri rahmat keatas rohnya...

Al Fatihah…

Will it be a reflection of my performance as a lecturer?

Yesterday my students sat for my paper. I have to say I felt a bit nervous for my students. I'm not sure if it is a normal feeling so I never bothered to ask anyone else. I just hope my students are able to perform well. Everyone was present for the exam, which I am thankful for as this means I wont have to worry about any make-up exams. Now comes the task of grading all 117 scripts. I haven't started yet as I am feeling rather unwell today and I have a few deadlines to meet by the end of this week. InsyaAllah, tomorrow I will make a start at marking the papers. I hope all (well maybe most) of my students will pass the paper and at least 20% of them will get an 'A'. But what if many of them fail? Will that be an indication that I am a bad lecturer? Or is it the students whom are weak? I guess I won't know until I'm done marking the papers.

From my talks with other lecturers, it does seem like the quality of students now are not as good as it used to be. It's either they don't care or they are really weak. I presume its more of the former than the latter. These student are so lazy, they just don't want to think for themselves. As long as there is a lecturer present, why bother thinking? Just ask the lecturer! Mind you yesterday during the exams the student had the nerve to ask me to explain a term in the question when they should understand it themselves. It's not like they've never seen a slightly different form of the term being used in one of my tutorial questions. Its just goes to show that they never even bother to do the set of exercise questions I have compiled for them. and there was this one student who brought pens that all ran out of ink the moment he started the exam. Luckily I had a pen with me that he could borrow. And imagine a student coming into the exam hall knowing that the exam paper requires lots of calculations but never bringing a calculator? Well that happened too! It is just so absurd! I can't even begin to imagine what are going through the minds of students these days.

Anyway, before I end my rants this time, I'd like to post a link to an interesting article written by an academician regarding his views on the current situation of the Universities in Malaysia. I quite agree with the writer. Personally, I think that some universities in Malaysia are lacking in resources and facilities. And in terms of ensuring our universities to reach world-class status, we certainly DO NEED to take only THE BEST candidates and NOT just anyone who can afford to pay the price we set even though they are academically weak.

Forgive me my blog for I have sinned.

Forgive me my blog for I have sinned. I have left you lying around in cyberspace with no entries and no new posts to show off to your fellow blog-colleagues.

This picture sums it all!
(Picture entitled "Buried Alive" courtesy of stock.xchng")

Hmm...what to do, eh? I've been swamped with work and now that the exam season is just round the corner the mounting workload coming my way seems like it will come to its peak soon. Come 5:30pm 22/3/06 I will have 117 answer scripts to grade and each would have 5 answers awaiting my attention. If all the answers are exactly like the answer scripts then everything will be a breeze but that is wishful thinking. Most of the scripts will leave me baffled as to what these students are trying to convey. Things you never thought of will come up and that leaves you feeling totally drained out. Anyway...let's just wait and see.

Apart from work, Shah and I have totally moved all our stuff from our rented apartment (which we have returned to the landlord) to our humble apartment in Un*ten (I think from now on to be safe I'll start putting in more asterisk marks to save myself from breaking any laws). Our small apartment is now packed and the living room is filled with our furniture and appliances. And this unfortunately leaves us with no room for a cabinet to put our yet to be bought stove. So our plans of having homecooked meals have to thrown out the window. So every night before we go home we make a stopover at the foodcourt to buy dinner which will be consumed in front of the telly.

I have to say my weekdays are so very mundane. Nothing exciting ever happens because both Shah and I are always doing workstuff, even at home after dinner. I don't know when this will end. I wonder if I am giving to much of my precious time to work-related stuff. Both of us need to have more time for ourselves. We are in dire need of a vacation/break/romantic getaway but when? Our anniversary is less than 3 weeks away but due to the coming exam season we'll just have to put our anniversary getaway plans on the shelf. The only thing we're looking forward to is our vacation to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah in May. I hope both of us can survive till then...

Layout, Anniversary..

I got bored of my previous layout and decided it's time for a change. I dont' know how long this one wil last. We'll just wait and see. For the moment I like the header picture which I found at Stock.Xchng. I think it fitsmy blog title what with the bee and all. And I like the colour blue.

Tomorrow is my last day on duty for this month. And I have to say it all went well. No big problems..in fact no problems at all. all due to it being semester break and not many students are here. As for my work plan thorughout this semester break which I mentioned in the previous entry, I don't think I managed to them all. I only got 1 set of notes prepared out of 4 that I planned to do. I still haven't read the masters dissertation I will be examining and the deadline is drawing closer by the day. And there's so much more that I didn't do. My Chinese New Year holiday was spent lazing around with Shah and watching movies on Astro. But I did get the test papers marked.

Gosh..it's already February and before I know it it'll be 29 March, our 4th wedding anniversary. I've got to get something planned for the few days before or after that date. Maybe we'll go for a nice romantic break somewhere in Malaysia to celebrate. I better start planning now. Any ideas for local romantic destinations?

We've moved

I'm wirintig this entry from the comfort of our new apartment on-campus. Yes, I got the resident fellow position and have started living on-campus since 3 weeks ago. We've just about settled down, i.e. we've got all our clothes and stuff moved over but our furniture is still at the old apartment. In terms of resident fellow duties, I will be on duty for the first time during the whole of next week when all the students are on their mid-semester break and most staff are away due to the long public holiday (Chinese New Year and Awal Muharram). Luckily we've managed to get the network connection (which is free by the way..woohoo) up and running and we also have Astro installed. I'm hoping those two will be enough to entertain Shah and I all through next week. Although I've got tonnes of work which I have to complete during the mid-sem break.

In about two months from Sunday Shah and I will be celebrating our 4th anniversary. I can't believe it'd been that long. Even though we have our ups and downs but I have to say most of the time we've spent together has been filled with lots of laughter and stupid jokes which we love to make together. I just pray that it will all last for years and years to come.

I'm jumping from topic to topic here because it's been quite a while since I've got to let out my rants and raves. So, whoever you are out there reading this, just bear with me. Last week i gave my students their first test. And from the one of the two piles that I've marked it looks like not many of them did well in the test. I'm really wrecking my brain thinking where have I gone wrong. Is it me not getting to them or them not bothering to understand what I'm saying. Honestly I have no idea. But there must be some way I can put across what I want them to understand efficiently and effectively. Today I handed them a questionaire to gauge what they don;t undrstand and what they think about my teaching methods as well as the course content. Hmm..I don't know what to say. Maybe I'll think up something/some way to be more effective during this term break.

I think I'd better stop now before I start babbling nonsense.