Winding Down for Easter
When I was a lad, back in England, the name for the Thursday before Good Friday was Maundy Thursday. That term isn’t used here in Ireland, where it seems to be known as Holy Thursday. Anyway, Maynooth University is closed tomorrow (Good Friday) but not today (Holy Thursday). Although today is not an official holiday, some campus facilities are in fact closed – including Pugin Hall, where I often have lunch. This helped me plan my activities for the day.
My agenda for Holy Thursday included:
- giving a 9am Computational Physics lecture;
- grading the submissions from the last Computational Physics lab test and writing feedback;
- meeting with my masters project student;
- supervising a computer lab session,;
- meeting with my undergraduate project student;
- going home, and collapse in a state of exhaustion.
To get to the last item as quickly as possible, I decided my strategy to make use of the lack of availability of food on campus would be to work all the way through lunch to get my grading done.
On the way to campus for the first item on the agenda I noticed how quiet the town was this morning. The schools are on holiday this week and next so there was no school run. The lack of people was even more noticeable when I got to campus, with many fewer students than usual, even at 8.45am. I did consider the possibility that nobody might appear for my lecture, but in the end I had about 30% of those expected. That’s a disappointing number but I gather it’s a better attendance than some of my colleagues got today. When I finished at about 10am, I walked back to my office through a still very quiet North campus.
As usual happens in a day’s work, there were quite a few interruptions – mainly to do with postgraduate matters – but I managed to do all my corrections ahead of the lab this afternoon. I also had my two project meetings, just to keep up-to-date before the break next week. It’s a stressful time for students as we approach the end of the academic year, so I advised them to make sure they book took at least a bit of time off to regroup for the final push and the submission of their reports.
Anyway, I’ve now ticked off every item on my to-do list except the last and will shortly make my way home to complete the job.
In the Dark 
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