My first parking fine

I got my first parking fine in the uni car park yesterday, $24. I was annoyed. I came prepared to uni with the $7.70 for the all day ticket only for the parking machine to spit all my coins back at me with the message "too many coins." THE MACHINE ONLY TAKES COINS! I subsequently had to feed the metre throughout the day but eventually ran out of coins because it is much cheaper to buy the full day ticket than pay $1.60 an hour. 

That being said, even with the $24 fine, paying to park on the days I drive in has been more coast effective than paying for a permit. I've also never missed out on a spot in the ticket area, whereas the permit zone fills by about 8.45am and plenty of permit holders either end up buying a ticket or parking 15mins away.

Oh university life, how poor you make us.

The other thing that university is making me at the moment is damn tired. I know I'm not the only one. It has been a long semester, exams are looming and all I feel like doing is sleeping. Most of the teachers at uni have been pretty good at guiding us in our revision and seem to want us to do well. One subject is proving the obvious exception. 

We haven't received our major assignments back but one of the teachers told us yesterday that she only awarded 1 high distinction out of her half of the marking. She said that she marked them harshly and that she didn't think we'd done very well. 

I would argue that for the first assignment for a subject in the first semester of first year, if the cohort has seriously underperformed the teaching staff ought to question whether they gave adequate instruction. The reality of first semester of first year is that we have no idea what we are doing. I think it is reasonably logical to deduce that if all of us have gone down the wrong track, then the map we were following was probably not sufficient.

For this year the subject is a combine first and second year subject. Whilst the second years' had a slightly different task, I wonder whether the marker reading their work in the same sitting as the first years' has been to our detriment. 

It irks me because it is not a particularly conceptually challenging or content heavy subject and I don't understand why the staff don't have a more collaborative attitude to their teaching. They seems to be making it difficult to score well to prove a point, but I can't work out what on earth that point could be.

Hopefully I will have done alright, or at least well enough for it not to impact my overall grade too much.

Exams are now less than a month away and I can't wait for them to be over!