Engineers

That dark hole on the right of the building is the entrance to the engineering block that I use to get to my office. While leaving the Engineering building this morning I saw a white hare hopping along. It was huge and white, with really long legs, big feet, and long straight ears. When I mean huge, its body was bigger than a big cat, but not huge like a rotweiller! I would have taken photos but I was so happy just to admire it hopping along. But I will take some photos of the "wildlife" here eventually.

I went on my first "course" today: a teaching assistants course. A teaching assistant (TA) is similar to what we'd call a tutor in SA. The course was pretty interesting and I had the opportunity to meet more people which was nice. It seems like the University takes TA's very seriously and I found the course useful as a guide of best practice. It would have been good to have done something like this before I was allowed to lecture young impressionable undergraduates at UCT.

What was interesting, was that all the TA's were graduate students, mostly PhD. Most the students present were not from Canada. I think 90% of us were foreign! Most of the foreigners were from the Middle-East and most of those were from Iran. We did a lot of group work. In my group I got to know 3 people from Iran, 1 from Bangledesh and 1 from India. I might have been the only African in the room. I felt special :-) Anyway, they all seem like good people and like they take the whole university and TA thing very seriously. But considering that they're mostly foreign students who are mostly at PhD level, they probably are the cream-of-the-crop.

University is definitely going to be a challenge for me. I've forgotten things like maths, stats and geomatics. It's scary! The TA course also emphasized numerous times that one should not TA a course if one doesn't know the topic that well, or doesn't like it. I feel like that's me! I've been given a course to TA that I don't like or know that well. I told the lecturer that I hadn't done it since university, but I didn't tell him that I detested the course while doing it myself! I'll have to feign enthusiasm. Maybe I'll enjoy it more the 2nd time around.