I always hate whinging on here cus no one wants that but God I need to explain how bad this is and no one in my house understands.

That’s the first problem, no one in my house is doing any of my modules this semester, so I can’t ask them for help if I’m stuck with anything. That’s pretty minor though, between the three of them only one did one module with me last semester and that worked fine. Last semester was simpler though.

Now as a final year, no module should ever be simple, and yes, all three last term were challenging, it’s just that in two days these modules have proved both challenging and problematic— which obviously isn’t a great combo.

For example, my sole text-based module this year has already been cancelled because our tutor got pneumonia. Now that’s awful, and I hope she recovers; but if she doesn’t well, she’s the only one in the school who can teach that module. Also, it’s A module on Beowulf, written in very old english (and if you think that sounds like shakespeare, or even like chaucer you are gravely, gravely mistaken). The long and short of it is I’ve lost at least one week out of twelve, which could mean either doing extra weeks to catch up, having a substitute tutor who won’t know their stuff or (In the worst case) having to repeat the module next year if our tutor’s too sick to teach.

The two creative-writing modules then you’d think would be a relief by comparison, since they’re both my specialties anyway, right? Well… no. Frankly. The first, Poetry, was always gonna be tricky since I have personally declared a vendetta on every poet ever to be published for what they’ve done to my life. What I didn’t expect was to be in a class surrounded by people with really tribal loyalties to certain trends of poetry and political beliefs therein. I worry that it’ll be a hugely stressful class because even in the first class everyone was fiercely arguing over what merits decent poetry or not AND WE HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED SUBMITTING STUFF YET. The most frustrating thing is that everyone’s allowed to do that because poetry, by definition, is pretty fucking subjective.

So drama should be good aye? well, in theory, yes. he problem is our tutor there. Now don’t get me wrong, he seems a nice guy in theory. For example, he’s such an old-timey English professor I doubted he was real, like he’ll ony accept submissions which are posted to him, he writes on a typewriter, and damn if his accent doesn’t just drip with Huge intelligence. Now you’ll notice I said this is good in theory. See, the reason we email tutors is so that if we have questions we can email them and get a quick response. The postal system requires at least 2 days to get a response, which isn’t great when he wants our first piece in 3 days. Also, he’s very strict about formatting, which is fair enough, but when the first piece he wants is a TV script and he’s only given us guidelines for Radio pieces that obviously isn’t right (For an extremely obvious example, you can See a TV and Not a Radio, so the radio directions don’t indicate how you’re supposed to convey any sort of stage direction or y’know, ANYTHING VISUAL AT ALL). And again, impossible to query because he only gave us a postal address. OK, he also gave us his home phone number, but all creepiness issues aside, that’s no use either, since it’s an Enniskillen Number. Enniskillen is a 2 hour drive away, and even if we did ring him at whatever the hell time he must get home, how are we to know he’ll even answer? He’s likely to spend about 4 hours a day travelling, and that’s not even including his time in classes during the day. 

It’s just a lot of practical problems. In short— The late medieval module will either not happen or be even more difficult than it is, we’re all likely to physically fight eventually in Poetry, and Drama is just impractical to the point of being obtuse.