Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student, Semester Two, Week Five
Of course, there are the days when everything kind of meshes. Kind of.
They're just balanced out by the weeks that don't.
This week gone by, I met Hamilton. Hamilton is an associate student; he studies, on average, a course a year. He does this because he wants it to be this way.
He also does this because Hamilton is sixty-two years old.
And because of this, nobody will sit next to him in the lectures.
This annoys me more than I think I can put into words, or at least words more coherent than 'what the fuck'.
I'm fairly unique, it seems, in my attitude to age. I was lucky; I spent a lot of time with excellent grandparents as a child, and I always loved talking to the other people in the place they lived in, because they were always happy to talk. I thought this was normal at the time.
I was lucky, too, in starting this course, in that I didn't actually let my Mature status - your mileage may vary - actually particularly bother me, and because of that, it seems, it didn't bother anyone else. I just got on with it, and then some; the key, it seems, is enthusiasm, up until the point where people start looking at you with the eyes that say yes, fine, but when do you actually, y'know, stop?, and after that it becomes a matter of generating enough goodwill to go on being enthusiastic without annoying anyone unduly.
So I got talking to Hamilton at the beginning of last week. He's happy enough; his children are at university themselves, and he was coming up to retirement age, so he though what the hey and decided to go back for some learnin' and see what the whole university shebang is about.
So now, he sits at the far right of the auditorium, on the front row - the mature student's row of choice, our hearing isn't so good, you know - and there's another mature student of about fifty or so nearby, but other than that, there's four or five empty seats next to him and one or two behind him, unless latecomers fill them up.
I get the whole perspective-of-youth thing. Mature students remind young students that the future exists, and, yes, you have to grow up some time, and you'll get wrinkles, it'll get colder and things generally slow down. When I began the course, I was worried about being the Spectre at the Feast; "hey, young people, do a degree, it's great! Look at me! I did a degree, and went out and got a successful job - no, wait... I found true love - no, that's not right either... I found my purpose in life - ah, screw it." Now I just tell them, in the politest possible terms, to enjoy being young. I don't mention anything else.
I may have mentioned this before, but in my first year, first time round, I was possibly the worst student I can imagine. Oh, I did lots of reading, and passed some courses, but there's nothing so terrifying as the apparent illusion of freedom (although walling us up into seven-story tower blocks containing sixty to seventy other students isn't exactly freedom) but I sucked like a dyson at the whole academic thing. C'est la vie.
Now, I care. I care with the passion of a convert turned fanatic; it feels like zeal a lot of the time. But I'm also the most manly Cassandra you'll ever meet; I hide my meaning in polite words and avoid making what I say sound like injunctions like the plague, but, as I've said before and I'll still be saying in three years time to the young people of today, do it right right now and it becomes so much easier.
Yeah, it's easy to stay in bed.
Yeah, you can miss two or three lectures and not break a sweat.
Yes, the courses in the first year don't matter to your final grade.
Yes, this is probably because they expect you to fuck up, ever so slightly.
... Where was I?
Anyway, if I can, I'm going to make a point of sitting next to the other mature students next week. Not because we should band together, in some sort of agéd pack of experienced hyenas, watching the rest of the naíve, young crowd piss and moan about having to attend lectures.
Just because if I don't do it, I don't think anybody else will. And that would sadden me more than you could know.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
And I know that I should let go, but I can't
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student, Semester Two, Week Four Point Two
Quantum Mechanics.
I subscribe to the Many-worlds interpretation. I just do. It doesn't mean I have to like it.
For instance; there are a few parallel universes out there where I didn't push away the people that mattered to me. In those worlds, the toast is always buttered, and I go to a regular job, surrounded by regular people, and I come home to a regular life. Don't laugh, it's possible; such is the nature of causality.
Hell, in some parallel universes I own my car, and maybe even my own house! I mean, let's not go crazy, but in an infinitely possible universe everything is possible, even a lottery win.
And at night, those other me's lay their heads down onto a fluffy pillow next to a loving wife, and sometimes they dream. They dream of a world where they get up before it's light to commute to a job, but not any ordinary job; this one they have to pay to do, instead of being paid for their work. And they do; they work their little hearts out and, at the end of the day, go back in a car they don't own, to a house they don't own.
If this sounds unnecessarily negative, perhaps it is; no, of course it is. Because it's incredibly easy to while away innocent hours with 'what if' questions about a past you can't change. It doesn't make the present any easier, and at the end of the day, it's still the night. We always find innovative ways to fuck things up; it's part of what makes us so delightfully human. I can count on four hands - you don't mind if I borrow yours, do you? - the interpersonal relationships, both friendship and the sticky kind of friendship that we call love - that I've frittered away, given up on, or actively screwed up, leading my life to the odd little crossroads it's at now; but instead of offering me a price for my soul, the Devil - at the crossroads, remember? - just gives me a quizzical look.
Being a mature student is a difficult balancing act. One one hand, you have this boundless opportunity to do something that actually matters to you, but on the other hand you pay for this every day by making no progress towards a real life (tm). And yes, perhaps a real life (tm) isn't all that great, but... This does, for whatever sins are available at a discount, matter to me. Just being here matters to me. The price is the price, but the goods are good.
God, I'm complaining again. Floridly. This seems to be happening more and more regularly, recently.
Here's the thing. Student life - the first time around on this particular merry-go-round - was messy, irritating and complicated. Drinking too much, a complete lack of financial awareness - hell, a complete lack of personal hygiene awareness, in some cases - stress, discontent, friendships made and broken, and essay deadlines, all boiling away in some jambalaya of the heart and soul. I actively hated parts of my first experience of student life; mainly finding out just how long the leash was on this supposéd taste of freedom before working life beckons.
Back in the day - when men were men, lecturers were (96%, anyway) utter bastards, a degree was something that demanded nothing less than total concentration. Some parts of the course were a lot like how I imagine purgatory to be; lots of work for no discernible reward, or long spaces with absolutely nothing to do punctuated by a frenzy of work that defined, apparently, the rest of your life's course. Put it this way; there were, on average, four lectures a week at, on average, two hours a lecture. This meant - and I'm glad you're keeping up with the maths here - eight hours of 'work' per week, leaving the other one hundred and sixty hours at your disposal.
Give a man a fish, and he enjoys a fish supper for a night. Give a teenager 160 hours a week to do some sort of nebulous 'study', and you can kind of guess what's going to happen.
It's - kind of - different, now, it seems. Oh yes. For instance, we have a shocking eleven hours of lectures a week instead of eight. How these young people cope with such an amazing amount of work is a source of constant mystery to me, it's wonders to behold.
But here's where the kicker of being a mature student comes in; socialising? Who he? Outside of lectures, normal life - as much as it ever existed - rests it's clawéd hand upon my shoulder, reminding me, cruelly, that the real world existeth and that it cannot be déníéd.
Anyway, enough with the accents. But I hope you see my point; the benefits and detriments columns of being a student are completely upended once you add the prefix 'mature'. I don't have to worry about socialising, about how much I can drink before I pass out, about whether girl (x) likes me...
... Well, I still worry about that a little...
... but I do have to devote myself, heart, soul and occasionally other things, to being a 'proper' student, which is just as nebulous as anything else mentioned herein.
My grades must be high.
My work must be good.
One comport oneself with dignity, efficacy and grace at all times.
Oh, you know what I mean, I suspect. Because for an 18-year-old to flunk a course or two isn't just acceptable, it's even expected; our lecturers banally announce that by the end of the first year, 10% of the students on the course will have dropped out. For this course, that's something like eighteen to twenty students. I find this amazing, because it means that 10% of the people on this course are too stupid to ask for help. I can say this because I was too stupid, back in the day, to ask for anything. Been there, done that, got the free Budweiser t-shirt. But for 10% of the class not to think "hold on, I'm paying these tuition fees, I have an advisory, I have tutors, I have friends, why don't I try to arrest this backslide into mediocrity?" is kind of alarming. And yes, statistically, of these 10%, some will suffer a personal tragedy, while others will simply run out of lawyers, drugs or - most importantly - money. Such is this bastard thing we call life. But still, a 10% dropout rate is just heinous, somehow.
Of course, in the same breath, they tell us that we don't need to worry about marks - we only have to pass; and that our negative-equity assignments don't matter as long as we do them, but if we do them, we win... Nothing.
A caveat; I love this course. With my heart and what passes for, yes, my soul. I as much of it as I can, which seems to be more than a lot of people; I work harder and longer than some of my confederates, but not as hard or long as, I suspect, the true devotees, of which shadowy sect I have yet to meet one. I like to believe in their existence, however, because the prospect of being one of the hardest workers on this course is, instead of happy-making, kind of terrifying.
So anyway, there's a whole chunk of confused young people there, especially when you consider that you have to pass every module to be admitted to the next year. So if you shoot for a pass and fuck up, well, damn, boy, it's resit time for you. The changes between course assessments and styles don't help, either; one course hands out no notes or handouts, so you attend and take notes or you're fuckéd. Other courses, by comparison, lull you into a false sense of security with copious handouts and lecture notes and - get this - useful seminars. Some insist on group work while others leave you to your own devices. So where do you pitch yourtent
Where indeed? There's a whole lot of space between 'just pass' and 'do well'.
And - as I keep trying to get across to my confederates - because of this, you have to shoot high, gods damn it, because if you shoot low and miss, shit. But if you shoot high and miss, you've still got the chance of leaving someone with an unexpected centre parting...
Diary of a Mature Student, Semester Two, Week Four Point Two
Quantum Mechanics.
I subscribe to the Many-worlds interpretation. I just do. It doesn't mean I have to like it.
For instance; there are a few parallel universes out there where I didn't push away the people that mattered to me. In those worlds, the toast is always buttered, and I go to a regular job, surrounded by regular people, and I come home to a regular life. Don't laugh, it's possible; such is the nature of causality.
Hell, in some parallel universes I own my car, and maybe even my own house! I mean, let's not go crazy, but in an infinitely possible universe everything is possible, even a lottery win.
And at night, those other me's lay their heads down onto a fluffy pillow next to a loving wife, and sometimes they dream. They dream of a world where they get up before it's light to commute to a job, but not any ordinary job; this one they have to pay to do, instead of being paid for their work. And they do; they work their little hearts out and, at the end of the day, go back in a car they don't own, to a house they don't own.
If this sounds unnecessarily negative, perhaps it is; no, of course it is. Because it's incredibly easy to while away innocent hours with 'what if' questions about a past you can't change. It doesn't make the present any easier, and at the end of the day, it's still the night. We always find innovative ways to fuck things up; it's part of what makes us so delightfully human. I can count on four hands - you don't mind if I borrow yours, do you? - the interpersonal relationships, both friendship and the sticky kind of friendship that we call love - that I've frittered away, given up on, or actively screwed up, leading my life to the odd little crossroads it's at now; but instead of offering me a price for my soul, the Devil - at the crossroads, remember? - just gives me a quizzical look.
Being a mature student is a difficult balancing act. One one hand, you have this boundless opportunity to do something that actually matters to you, but on the other hand you pay for this every day by making no progress towards a real life (tm). And yes, perhaps a real life (tm) isn't all that great, but... This does, for whatever sins are available at a discount, matter to me. Just being here matters to me. The price is the price, but the goods are good.
God, I'm complaining again. Floridly. This seems to be happening more and more regularly, recently.
Here's the thing. Student life - the first time around on this particular merry-go-round - was messy, irritating and complicated. Drinking too much, a complete lack of financial awareness - hell, a complete lack of personal hygiene awareness, in some cases - stress, discontent, friendships made and broken, and essay deadlines, all boiling away in some jambalaya of the heart and soul. I actively hated parts of my first experience of student life; mainly finding out just how long the leash was on this supposéd taste of freedom before working life beckons.
Back in the day - when men were men, lecturers were (96%, anyway) utter bastards, a degree was something that demanded nothing less than total concentration. Some parts of the course were a lot like how I imagine purgatory to be; lots of work for no discernible reward, or long spaces with absolutely nothing to do punctuated by a frenzy of work that defined, apparently, the rest of your life's course. Put it this way; there were, on average, four lectures a week at, on average, two hours a lecture. This meant - and I'm glad you're keeping up with the maths here - eight hours of 'work' per week, leaving the other one hundred and sixty hours at your disposal.
Give a man a fish, and he enjoys a fish supper for a night. Give a teenager 160 hours a week to do some sort of nebulous 'study', and you can kind of guess what's going to happen.
It's - kind of - different, now, it seems. Oh yes. For instance, we have a shocking eleven hours of lectures a week instead of eight. How these young people cope with such an amazing amount of work is a source of constant mystery to me, it's wonders to behold.
But here's where the kicker of being a mature student comes in; socialising? Who he? Outside of lectures, normal life - as much as it ever existed - rests it's clawéd hand upon my shoulder, reminding me, cruelly, that the real world existeth and that it cannot be déníéd.
Anyway, enough with the accents. But I hope you see my point; the benefits and detriments columns of being a student are completely upended once you add the prefix 'mature'. I don't have to worry about socialising, about how much I can drink before I pass out, about whether girl (x) likes me...
... Well, I still worry about that a little...
... but I do have to devote myself, heart, soul and occasionally other things, to being a 'proper' student, which is just as nebulous as anything else mentioned herein.
My grades must be high.
My work must be good.
One comport oneself with dignity, efficacy and grace at all times.
Oh, you know what I mean, I suspect. Because for an 18-year-old to flunk a course or two isn't just acceptable, it's even expected; our lecturers banally announce that by the end of the first year, 10% of the students on the course will have dropped out. For this course, that's something like eighteen to twenty students. I find this amazing, because it means that 10% of the people on this course are too stupid to ask for help. I can say this because I was too stupid, back in the day, to ask for anything. Been there, done that, got the free Budweiser t-shirt. But for 10% of the class not to think "hold on, I'm paying these tuition fees, I have an advisory, I have tutors, I have friends, why don't I try to arrest this backslide into mediocrity?" is kind of alarming. And yes, statistically, of these 10%, some will suffer a personal tragedy, while others will simply run out of lawyers, drugs or - most importantly - money. Such is this bastard thing we call life. But still, a 10% dropout rate is just heinous, somehow.
Of course, in the same breath, they tell us that we don't need to worry about marks - we only have to pass; and that our negative-equity assignments don't matter as long as we do them, but if we do them, we win... Nothing.
A caveat; I love this course. With my heart and what passes for, yes, my soul. I as much of it as I can, which seems to be more than a lot of people; I work harder and longer than some of my confederates, but not as hard or long as, I suspect, the true devotees, of which shadowy sect I have yet to meet one. I like to believe in their existence, however, because the prospect of being one of the hardest workers on this course is, instead of happy-making, kind of terrifying.
So anyway, there's a whole chunk of confused young people there, especially when you consider that you have to pass every module to be admitted to the next year. So if you shoot for a pass and fuck up, well, damn, boy, it's resit time for you. The changes between course assessments and styles don't help, either; one course hands out no notes or handouts, so you attend and take notes or you're fuckéd. Other courses, by comparison, lull you into a false sense of security with copious handouts and lecture notes and - get this - useful seminars. Some insist on group work while others leave you to your own devices. So where do you pitch your
Where indeed? There's a whole lot of space between 'just pass' and 'do well'.
And - as I keep trying to get across to my confederates - because of this, you have to shoot high, gods damn it, because if you shoot low and miss, shit. But if you shoot high and miss, you've still got the chance of leaving someone with an unexpected centre parting...
Monday, 15 February 2010
Although not the most honest means of travel, it gets me there nonetheless
Our Director writes:
Diary of a Mature Student, Semester Two, Week Four
I've found myself developing some somewhat strange, somewhat comic behaviours over the past few weeks. Nothing too strange, but just different enough to make me wonder what's prompted them.
There's a moment of existential ennui, it would seem, upon returning to the Park and Ride on a daily basis. If you do something four days a week, every week, for fourteen to fifteen weeks in a row, your brain starts - it seems - to give up on remembering exactly where your car is when you return after a hard day's studenting.
So I stand there, for a few seconds, trying to remember which particular space I could find that morning. It doesn't matter, of course, because I have a relatively distinctive car anyway, but it's always a very confusing short space of time.
My car is distinctive for a number of reasons. For one, it's dinky. Of course, size apparently doesn't matter, but on a few occasions people have been slightly shocked when I unfold myself from the front seat. But another reason it's distinctive is that it has a very strange music system. Oh, it was beautiful and up-to-day in, let's say, 2001, but since then, it's been all downhill, baby. The radio, for instance, works out of both speakers - 90% of the time - but the cd player doesn't, something I wouldn't have personally thought possible.
Then again, the CD player only works 30% of the time anyway, so if you find a CD that actually works, hoo boy, that's the goddamn jackpot right there.
[Sidebar: for those keeping score, I do actually like my car. It drives well and it gets me where I'm going. But every car has it's quirks.]
One of the CDs that works, for instance, is the soundtrack to the 2006 version of Casino Royale. I discovered this on one of my first journeys, wherein I tried eight or nine different CDs - getting Error 3 or Error 6 depending on whether it couldn't or wouldn't play them, respectively - before finding that my car likes, for some reason, David Arnold.
This is one of those things that couldn't really be much more inappropriate if it tried. The only time my car would ever be in a Bond movie is if it were being rammed off the road by the villain. Oh, sure, it might fit in in a Bourne movie, but shit, whoever accused them of automobilic taste?
However, I find the disconnect really funny. More funny than I should.
The entrance to the Park and Ride is a side lane, alongside which runs three lanes of traffic, which will either be waiting for the lights or pulling away.
And so, I find it very funny to get into the side lane, and cruise past the traffic with the Bond theme playing at an audible volume. Slinking past succinctly, like a shark, you might say.
Of course, you might not...
Diary of a Mature Student, Semester Two, Week Four
I've found myself developing some somewhat strange, somewhat comic behaviours over the past few weeks. Nothing too strange, but just different enough to make me wonder what's prompted them.
There's a moment of existential ennui, it would seem, upon returning to the Park and Ride on a daily basis. If you do something four days a week, every week, for fourteen to fifteen weeks in a row, your brain starts - it seems - to give up on remembering exactly where your car is when you return after a hard day's studenting.
So I stand there, for a few seconds, trying to remember which particular space I could find that morning. It doesn't matter, of course, because I have a relatively distinctive car anyway, but it's always a very confusing short space of time.
My car is distinctive for a number of reasons. For one, it's dinky. Of course, size apparently doesn't matter, but on a few occasions people have been slightly shocked when I unfold myself from the front seat. But another reason it's distinctive is that it has a very strange music system. Oh, it was beautiful and up-to-day in, let's say, 2001, but since then, it's been all downhill, baby. The radio, for instance, works out of both speakers - 90% of the time - but the cd player doesn't, something I wouldn't have personally thought possible.
Then again, the CD player only works 30% of the time anyway, so if you find a CD that actually works, hoo boy, that's the goddamn jackpot right there.
[Sidebar: for those keeping score, I do actually like my car. It drives well and it gets me where I'm going. But every car has it's quirks.]
One of the CDs that works, for instance, is the soundtrack to the 2006 version of Casino Royale. I discovered this on one of my first journeys, wherein I tried eight or nine different CDs - getting Error 3 or Error 6 depending on whether it couldn't or wouldn't play them, respectively - before finding that my car likes, for some reason, David Arnold.
This is one of those things that couldn't really be much more inappropriate if it tried. The only time my car would ever be in a Bond movie is if it were being rammed off the road by the villain. Oh, sure, it might fit in in a Bourne movie, but shit, whoever accused them of automobilic taste?
However, I find the disconnect really funny. More funny than I should.
The entrance to the Park and Ride is a side lane, alongside which runs three lanes of traffic, which will either be waiting for the lights or pulling away.
And so, I find it very funny to get into the side lane, and cruise past the traffic with the Bond theme playing at an audible volume. Slinking past succinctly, like a shark, you might say.
Of course, you might not...
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