Achievement Unlocked: You have reached a new level!

Winter has cast her cloak over the Midlands and Leicester has gotten colder and grayer than before. The thirty minute walk into town or to the CrossFit box now feels as though it would take days and as a result I've not strayed too far from the house this past week, leaving only to go into the department. 

As a matter of fact, I've gone into the department almost every day this week which is quite unusual for me. I tend to prefer working from home where I can spread my papers out in bed, grab a cup of tea every now and then, and meow at Poes on the occasions where the work gets a bit too much for my fragile brains to handle. This week was different though.

On occasion, the department has paid work available to PhD students. I've taken advantage of this quite a lot recently. I've done transcription work, marked essays, delivered a two hour workshop on dialogue in the museum, and this past week I was a second marker for presentations the MA students had to give as part of their second module. 

As someone who has been known to play games on occasion, I am no stranger to the concept of leveling up a character. In fact, from January to about August I leveled up a Worgen Druid in World of Warcraft. You go out into the world, take on a bunch of quests, grind for months and pretty soon you've got a max level character, a garrison, and more gold than Donald Trump could imagine. The only thing is, that it's all in a digital fantasy world. (Honestly, I wish I could transfer some of that gold into the real world so I could pay off these lousy student loans!) 

Here she is. My level 100 Worgen Druid taking a selfie in Stormwind. (Yeah, you can take selfies in the game.)

Anyway, marking the presentations this week, I feel as though I've leveled up in real life. I'm no stranger to grading. I taught primary school music for four years and I did give some assignments which required me to mark my students. I'm not even a stranger to having to mark in real time as presentations require you to do. I used to give my recorder students performance tests to check on their progress. I will admit, however, that there is a rather large gap between marking a nine year old's recorder playing and an MA student's fifteen minute presentation on either human resource management or how external political relationships exert pressure on internal missions. As I learned this week there are many ways to approach this task.

What I struggled with most as I was marking was being able to take myself outside of the content of what the student was delivering and to look at the elements of the presentation as well as it as a whole. It wasn't until the end of the second day that I started to be able to do this and it wasn't until the last day that I could do both: look at the whole picture and the content at the same time. It's a lot like conducting a choir actually. You have to be able to hear the harmony but also what each part is doing at the same time. It's something that really took me years to develop. In the end, I found that I could write my feedback while the student was delivering their talk. I also found that I was able to ask better questions which helped me to probe their understandings of the issues they researched. I really felt myself move beyond my original capabilities this past week. It was like discovering another part of my brain. 

It was as though I had accepted a quest to mark eighteen MA presentations and during those nine hours of grinding,* I actually leveled up. I think my Worgen would be proud of me. 

Well, she would be proud of me if I hadn't gotten her shot with an arrow while taking a selfie in enemy territory.

*Grinding is a term used by gamers to describe repetitive tasks which help you level your characters. And yes, I did just put a footnote into my blog. I think this PhD is getting to me.