14th December 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I had a really enjoyable week last week. My sleep pattern is still all messed up since returning from Hong Kong, and I’m waking up at 5am wide-eyed, and ready to start the day. It tends to mean I’m really tired by about 6pm, and have to sleep for a couple of hours, and then can’t get to sleep in the evening until quite late. While this generally isn’t good, and I’m trying to get out of it, it means that I’m getting loads of work done because I’m awake at unsociable hours.
I’m really ticking off the programming tasks now, and something which I made a real dent in last week was a new qualifications system for our website. Basically we have previously had to manually categorise tutors’ and students’ qualifications, so that we can match them effectively, but I’m trying to make that much more automated. It’s not a simple as it sounds (lots of my friends say “that’s easy right, they have Maths A-level, so they can teach Maths GCSE), because we have to cope with spelling mistakes, and also come up with a clever system of finding the relationships between different subjects. I’m quite excited though – it’s a lot of work over the next month for a brilliant result.
Obviously the main education story last week was the tuition fee protests in London, and I’m sure that many of our students were anxiously awaiting the decision from parliament. It’s a real shame that a small minority of the protesters became violent, because I think it detracts from a wider, quite worrying, aspect of the way that our country is run, which is that those in power don’t appear to listen to us. The situation was the same before the Iraq war, when a massive protest in London did little to sway the eventual decision. I just wonder whether we’ll have the same retrospect on tuition fees as we do now on the war.