The semester's invigilating

 Since I went back to giving exams in person, I've been able to bring knitting to work on while I invigilate. I *think* I only worked on this this semester (No, I guess I did work on the Antler Toque first, so this is the second half of the semester).

But I *only* worked on this while invigilating exams, so you can see that knitting, even simple knitting, is fairly slow:

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This is "A Sweater for John," from Sherlock Knits by Joanna Johnson. 

It's knit of worsted weight, so it goes faster than dk or fingering weight would, but still - this is about 10" and the body needs to be 18" before I start on the sleeves. (This is knit all in one piece, then the sleeves are knit, then they are attached and the shaping is doing with decreases.)

A big chunk of it was knit this week - finals here are 2 hours, whereas the in-class exams are either 50 or 75 minutes depending on the class. 

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Other than that, I'm just kind of tired. I handed in two classes' worth of grades, will turn in the other two's tomorrow, but for one class, as soon as I posted grades on the class webpage, people started e-mailing me - had you applied the curve? (Yes, I had, and I even noted that). "Is this the highest grade I can possibly get?" (yes, it is). "Is there anything I can do to get a higher grade?" (no, not at this point). A couple of the e-mails, I couldn't tell if they were merely terse or slightly huffy. I'm telling myself that they're just terse, and it's my interpretation of it coloring my reaction.

(I can tell my emotions are closer to the surface, and that I have a harder time regulating my moods now. I hope I can get better at it again. I suspect it's just being hit with a lot of stuff these past two plus years. But I do have to remind myself of it when I get ready to send off a huffy e-mail myself, or when I get kind of teary because I feel like I'm being put-upon.)

Anyway, tomorrow I have an Assessment Task (this is partly why I felt put upon earlier). Several of us were asked to write a new assessment exam. Well, they gave it this fall and people did worse on it, and the prof in the class tried it against the old one, and they did better on the supposedly outdated old one. So the conclusion is we wrote some questions that were bad or confusing, and will have to redo them. (And I really don't have the energy for a re-do of my part right now). So what I have to do is analyze the results  to see which questions were the most missed, and then see if they need to be rewritten. It won't be bad, and it won't take long, but it is just another thing to do. And it makes me feel like I failed at something else (writing questions that were bad or too hard) and I feel like all I've done this fall is fail. 

I guess the "lesson" of these times for me is: you are not as good as you thought you were and get comfortable with being bad at stuff. It's a frustrating lesson for when I'm within maybe a decade of retiring, but honestly, this whole existence is basically held together with the cosmic equivalent of duct tape and baling wire, so why SHOULDN'T I get hit NOW with a lesson I should have learned at 28? 

And I admit, I still kind of want to throw a tantrum, but I know it won't fix anything or help anything and there's no one to sit down on the floor next to me and go "there, there" and anyway, most people I know would yell at me and tell me "you're not the only one struggling now, you know." So I guess I just keep muddling on but also have to accept that I'm not as good at things as I thought.