Today I decided that I should take a rest from teaching. Perhaps it is better this way as Ramadhan is approaching. With old age, I have been slower doing things and I get tired easily. So with Ramadhan, I fear I will not be able to teach well. As it is, my students rating in XMUM was not that good and what surprised me (maybe I should not), I had poorer rating for Mathematical Methods, the subject which I find more interesting to teach than Electrodynamics. Then I realised that Mathematical Methods was taught in the afternoon (during lunch time) after Electrodynamics in the morning. Two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. Thus by the afternoon, I was already quite exhausted. Of course, there was also less sleep in the night before, to prepare four hours of lecture. Certainly, I wished I had done my teaching better. I could give justifications on the less ideal situation that I'm in, but I won't. As the students say, these will be just excuses. This week, when I opened my e-mail, I saw that I have a few more reports to submit for my teaching portfolio (note this is much more detailed in comparison with UPM). There was an excel file that I could not get to work the first time (during my portfolio submission) and I had to find some details from the colleagues in XMUM for me to proceed and it needed tweaking. One of the things when you have a standard set-up for everyone, there is little room for variations in the way one does things. An easy example is that I give choices for students to pick exam questions that they are more comfortable to answer and also with continuous assessment, due to the many questions that I give them in the assignments, I used capping marks in order to help those students who could not do all of them. Both of these need workarounds for the given excel file and it took more than three days for me to do this. Finally, I submitted all reports and returned the marked exam scripts to the exam unit. So I went to campus for the last time and returned my office keys.
Another thing that came up, was that I found people are making fun of me that includes a past student. I was feeling down but maybe I shouldn't be in this age of trolls. Being older, I tend to be more sensitive these days. Sometimes people make fun of someone, looking down on him/her, because they want to feel better themselves. If so, I felt disappointed on what happened. Perhaps I have trained them wrong. For now, I have made all my blogs private (for fear of more mocking). I'm not sure when will I make them public again. I prefer to spend time alone at this stage, reflecting on things, doing work in silence. I will spend more time in the smaller room at the back, simply because it is cooler here in the afternoon. My own room gets too much sunshine, it gets terribly warm. Here is my view (perfect for working alone).
The other thing that happened this week was Aaron Bushnell setting himself on fire as a protest to the current genocide. I watched the full video and I felt a little sick and had to lie down. There has been many cases of self-immolation (a new word I have learned) in the past but they have been done as the extreme form of protest. In the case of Bushnell, some parties tried to paint him as mentally ill, perhaps trying to lessen the impact of the message that he is carrying.
Finally I would like to close this post with this supplication:
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