so the strange tale of where my psych ices forms went has been solved: they were sitting in the online education office in engineering hall. of course they were...cause that just makes...no sense at all.

anyway...i have to bring them back to the ices office because for some reason they ran the comparison data with the library science department so the ratings are all kinds of fucked up. but, i got a 4.9/5.0...which means i'll definitely be on the outstanding list for that class. and, actually, it would even put me on that list if i were teaching in library science. so that's pretty damn cool.

4.9? well, i definitely don't feel like i deserved it since it was such a weird ass semester. i guess because it was so hard to juggle all the health stuff with the teaching load i felt like i wasn't really teaching it the way i'd wanted to. but then again...given how strangely the class was structured this year i kind of had to just improv everything each week because every time i planned things out, it would have to be completely thrown out by the end of the lecture. so that made discussion very weird sometimes and so i relied a lot on personal stories.

what got me, though, were the personal comments about how they had never had a ta who gave a damn about them as people until taking my section...and this was a class of mostly all graduating seniors. and that makes me sad/mad about this place even more because i believe it, i believe it because it's happened to me here (of most recent events was thursday's car *relocation* battle). as students, we're second class citizens of the universities that are *supposed* to be here for the students...at least that's what i (probably) naively still believe. so i guess i try the best that i can to try not to treat others the way i've been treated, the way i know others get treated, etc. i hear all the stories from the girls in wimse about their feelings of helplessness when they have a professor or a ta who won't take the time to consider that, you know, weird shit does really happen to people sometimes.

yeah, they've probably been burned before...but the thing that i really wonder about is are they acting that way because they no longer trust their students or is it because that's how they were treated so now that they have a position of power it's now "their turn" to be the assholes because that's how the system works?

i guess that's the choice we have -- we can either fight the system in the effort to try to change it or just help it keep running itself into the ground...

it's definitely a tiring place to be on the side of fighting the system, though. but i couldn't go with any other way of doing things. but that doesn't mean that there's not room for improvement in my methods...i guess if i felt like there wasn't room for improvement than maybe i'd suddenly wake up one day and find myself to be another brick in the wall. and that just won't do.