Thursday 10 May 2012

...to those who wait

I've neglected this blog of late...a houseful of builders has distracted me for the past month and a half!!

Well, still no news on my assignment...I have acknowledgement of receipt and my tutor kindly informed me that he is now on holiday until the 21 May so it will be nigh on June before I hear word probably...as it happens I'm not anxiously hanging on the postman's tails (not that I would you understand, well Bet Lynch wig aside!!). And I know even tutors are allowed a holiday or two...however, I can't help but notice the difference in experience between this and my last tutor who responded before I'd popped open a bottle of rioja, which admittedly did seem extraordinarily quick. Why so different? Perhaps this is more the norm. Either which way, I am hoping that I'll fully appreciate the wait retrospectively, when the feedback lands.

To a certain extent I feel I have, with help, critically reviewed this piece of work and learnt from it already. And yesterday I created an image, not assignment related, that even if only fleetingly, I liked...this occurs less frequently than a blue moon, whatever that is!! So late last night, still buzzing, I may have stumbled on a way forward to progress the Domestic Sublime series beyond this assignment.

As I say, I've been happily distracted recently...and I'm not good at covering the middle ground...I'm either on it or I'm not. So following a big party and inevitably a hangover to nurse this weekend...I'll be back to it next week.

10 comments:

  1. It isn't the norm, Penny, in my experience; and if it becomes an issue for you, you could take it up with OCA.

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  2. Hey Penny

    Good to hear from you—funny—was wondering what had happened and why you had been so quiet a couple of minutes ago!

    As for your own critical review of your work—I do that as well. As soon as I post it off and do my initial reflections. It's still fresh in my head and not influenced by what my tutor says. But I also do reflect when he comes back with his response. Double reflection? But I think I learn from it.

    As for the tutor comments—let's face it—the previous one was extraordinary and this one quite different—I'd wait and see how it pans out a little.

    Enjoy that party and hangover!!

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  3. Hi Penny, I hope your weekend goes really well, and that the feedback arrives quickly - so glad to hear you're feeling inspired to continue with Domestic Sublime.

    As for timings, you do seem to go from one extreme to the other. As Vicki says your previous tutor was exceptional, and from what I've seen, anything up to three weeks is normal practice. Longer than that is not standard but of course there may be exceptional reasons.

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  4. I think Stan's advice is good Penny. Those kind of extremes of response must be quite de-stabilizing and maybe OCA could add something to their general guidelines for tutors.
    Good to see you back anyway. Are we going to be able to have a look at the image you did last night??

    Catherine (blogger has made me anonymous again!)

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  5. Thanks Stan, Vicki, Eileen and Catherine. I will probably reserve judgement for now as I'm in no rush to receive the results...but it does make me wonder how varied all our experiences, advice and relationships with our tutors must be and what knock-on effect that has, positive most of time but also otherwise.

    Catherine, I will post the image in another post...just need to think about a few things before I do.

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  6. I would say that turnaround times of less than seven days are exceptional but, under normal conditions, over three weeks is pushing the boundaries of what a student should expect.

    One has to bear in mind that most tutors aren't sitting at their machines waiting for student assignments to come in and immediately take top spot in their priority list.

    Assignments tend to arrive in batches, especially close to assessment dates, and a typical assignment report might take three hours to write, meaning it's not possible to write more than two reports a day even if a tutor has the luxury of setting aside a whole day.

    If your assignment is joining the back of a queue it's easy to see how it can take two or three weeks to get your feedback.

    Perhaps the OCA should introduce an express service for double the fee. ' }

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  7. Yeh that sounds an altogether reasonable scenario...and 3 hours to write a report is far more than I had appreciated. That is a big chunk of a day if you have a few to do. I suspect tutors are torn in all sorts of directions. I guess for most of us we never meet 'the tutor', they remain an unknown quantity in cyber space, its difficult to build a picture of their 'life' beyond someone who looks at your assignments.

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  8. Hi Penny, like you I am doing Landscape (alongside PWDP - seemed like a good idea at the time!) and from your comments re holiday timings I suspect we have the same tutor. In fact I have him as tutor for both my L2 courses and in my experience the feedback has taken longer than with some other tutors but has on both occasions been detailed and constructive.

    Best
    Dave (aka fatherpie)

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  9. ps - moved from the iPad to the iMac so I don't need to be anonymous :-)

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  10. Thanks Dave, good to know...

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