Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Semester Two, Week Thirteen-ish
Do you ever have one of those days?
No, not bad ones necessarily. Just the days when something very odd occurs to you?
For instance, I'm coming around to the theory that the British university system is a lot like Bleach. The series, not the cleaning product.
Here's the thing. Bleach deals with a high-school student plucked from obscurity by virtue of a misunderstood talent and an encounter with a Soul Reaper, which leaves him doing the soul reaper-y work. Eventually, he travels to another world, infiltrates a secret society and exposes the corruption going on therein before another afterlife secret society comes after the first one, and fighting ensues. Lots of fighting ensues. Lots and lots of fighting. Wall-to-wall, in fact.
The first afterlife afterworld is called Soul Society. This consists of an outside world - Rukongai - where all the souls of the dead are reborn - and Seireitei, the walled-off enclosure at the centre where only those with high spiritual pressure, i.e. those who have the ability to become soul reapers, go to be trained and sent back into the real world to do the aforementioned reaper-y duties. Rukongai is organised into districts (80, if I remember rightly), with 80 being the roughest all the way up to an unforseen 1. Never mind about Rukongai District 9, of course.
Here's the first similarity, at least in terms of the way people treat students; if you're at university, you're expected to be intelligent enough to be there and talented enough in one area to progress through the course. It's not literally walled off from the Real World, of course - although some act like they'd like to be - but one thing that makes me want to bash peoples' heads together is when you get the stereotyped Student Elite who think they're above Normal People by virtue of education. I've seen them, I've met them, and they never get any better. So if the wall isn't literal, it's attitudinal and intellectual, then.
Within Seireitei, the soul reapers complete their training and are then assigned to a division (within this analogy, an academic discipline), where if they're really talented they become a seated officer, and if they have the necessary power they become a captain or a vice-captain. The morass of unseated officers is never really portrayed, but think of them in terms of the morass of undergraduates; some will stay on and be smart or tenacious enough to be postgraduate students, some of these will then go on to do P.h.Ds, and when that's completed, they can work their way towards being a lecturer, a researcher, or - shock and horror and shock - maybe even the department head one day.
The first year at university has felt kind of like this; a seething, roiling mixture of undergraduates, some of who care about their degrees, some of whom don't; some of who do the work, some of whom don't; some of who will go on to do well, some of whom won't, etc, etc. It's seeding and weeding time, ladies and gentlemen; the lecturers, after twenty-eight weeks of dealing with us, know who speaks up in class, who doesn't turn up, who does the work, and, thanks to immensely lax security systems, who's taken what out from our library when.
(Seriously. The library computer system is open and unsecure here. A more devious person than me could check out their fellow students' reading habits without muss, fuss or even bother.)
Whoever's worth the effort can consider themself seeded; they can go to ask for help, or advice, or anything without fear of being shut out. Those who are being weeded, then, either drop out or plod on, and on, and Ariston.
I know it's not the best analogy, but it's all I've got of a Friday afternoon, and coming up on the end of the year, it feels righteous somehow. Granted, it'd work a bit better if the worse students were eaten by Hollows, but hey, you can't have everything.
It's testing and exams for the next few weeks, script kiddies; expect fun.
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