I’ve spent the last week, give or take a few days, proctoring. It’s not the most fun activity. The pay is minimum wage, and it’s pretty mindless. You go in a class get it ready for an exam, let the students in, read some stuff, say “start” then a few hours later you say “stop”, and in between you walk up and down and hope something interesting happens. That, in a nutshell, is proctoring.

One more day of this nonsense and then I can go and get back to … what? Not sure exactly. I’m marooned in Ottawa for Christmas. Sheema’s gone to Dubai and I can’t really go anywhere. I guess I can travel to Toronto and visit some friends if I really wanted to. But I guess that’s the thing. I don’t really want to go anywhere. At least not right now. It just so happens that I can’t leave Canada. Thanks to the Canadian government and their mishandling of my visa. So for probably the first time, my circumstances actually fit my mood. Imagine that. So why am I complaining? Was I complaining?

Anyway. I’m still a month behind on my thesis project and I need to put in some time on it before I head to Nassau (hopefully for New Years). So I need to get going on that, and I will. Soon as I’m done proctoring! Yay! And complaining!

Funny thing about proctoring though, the only people doing it are grad students and retirees. This really says something about the amount of money that they are paying grad students. Believe me, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t have to. The retirees might be doing it if it were volunteer labor. Many of them are former teachers and it seems they like spending time with students. However, this may also be an indictment on the state of their pensions. Or is it the economy… If it were the economy I would expect to see a lot more people signing up to proctor. That is not happening, so I will unscientifically blame other things.

I would love to be researching. To spend my days in pure contemplation of my topic. This did not happen this summer, and it is not happening now. Why? The University wants servitude in exchange for their scholarships. You do get money, but not enough that you can actually ignore a pittance of a job like proctoring. That Grads like myself feel compelled to be exploited (again) by the University is sad.

Yes, I am sad. Does poverty encourage study I wonder? Maybe I will ponder this very thought when I walk through the aisles tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Subplots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.