Nickbits

Etiquette, Courtesy

Since releasing two ported themes for Drupal last year I have had numerous emails.  Mostly positive, a few asking for additional features and a few bugs.  I have no problem with this, in-fact I encourage it.  Most people are polite and patient.  However, as always there is usually the one or two exceptions.  Impatience is one of the problems where I get an email saying "your theme doesn’t work and I need to work now" or "I need feature xyz for a website that I have promised to be completed today".  

There is no reason in any case not to use the correct etiquette.  Several of the queries I have had have been people wanting help for their commercial projects.  Firstly, I have no problem helping people with commercial projects, however, it must fit in with my schedule and I have to be paid.  Remember the themes are provided free, worked on in my spare time and have been ported for free.  I will not rush anything or put other items on hold.

Ignorance

I have mentioned before at my delight of people saying to me that teaching is easy.  I had another person mention to me of Thursday how easy teaching was and how lazy teachers are.  The person is doing a course at a college (or university).  To cut a long story short, the person handed in an assignment a while back but has not yet had it back marked.  Hence this naturally means in their mind that all teachers are lazy and do not do any work.  Okay, some teachers may be but I would like to re-iterate this is the minority.  Let’s say a college lecturer has 25hours of teaching.  I am told that for every 1 hour of teaching you only need 30minutes of preparation.  That is fine if you have a subject that doesn’t change much.  Once you have your notes prepared then you just re-use them year after year.  However, in a subject that is constantly changing, i.e. electronics and computing, not only does the technology and standards move rapid, the syllabus is changed with increasing regularity.  All in all this means that you are lucky if your material lasts for two academic years.  Hence for every hour teaching many of us spend at least an hour preparing.  So in a 25 hour teaching week you would be doing an additional 25hours of preparation.  Now do not forget the marking as well, or the meetings, or any of the other paperwork.  

Most of use work hard and put our students first; it is only the minority that let the side down.  Unfortunately you generally only hear the bad points and never the good points.  I would love for anyone who says teaching is easy to have a go at it.  I have seen many people come in to teaching saying it will be easy, only then to last at most a year before deciding to change career.

It is this ignorance that is getting to me.  I know if I go to the Doctors for example and have a test it will take time to get the results.  I know they are professional and respect that they will do their job correctly.  Likewise with any other profession, except teaching.  Everyone thinks they can do it better, stop and think about what we have to do before saying it is easy.