Diary of a Mature Student: Some Kind Of Conclusion
An hour ago, as I stood outside, the sun had set but the sky was not quite dark, and there was a pleasant breeze. It felt like a perfect moment, crystallised for the briefest instant.
In the last couple of weeks, I've put in several fourteen-to-sixteen hour days.
I've spent hour upon hour working on the same film clips in the same timeline for the same objective.
On top of this, I spent many hours on a personal project that will contribute nothing other than a vague sense of professionalism to the proceedings.
Thanks to all this, my body clock appears to have reset itself to Samoan time; I've not slept more than five hours a night (down from the usual eight to nine) for three nights now, having seen the sun rise two days in a row.
This has been an off-the-books disaster of a seminar, for various reasons. The main reason for this is Practical Filmmaking Two. But let's decompress that.
Practical Filmmaking Two is a module for next year. It offers students the chance to create their own short film project, narrative or documentary, up to a length of twenty minutes. It is, in short, (relative) creative freedom to do something we're being taught, and primed, to do.
Practical Filmmaking Two has a fucking laundry list of prerequisites.
To begin with, in your first year you have to have taken Screenwriting One. This is less to have done the course - Screenwriting One is fifteen weeks of purgatory with no practical outcome - but more because you have to take Screenwriting One in order to take Screenwriting Two in your second year.
Screenwriting Two is no less an exercise in frustration and mundanity. But it's important, because without that, you can't get on Practical Filmmaking One, which is, you've guessed it, the prerequisite for PF2.
Meanwhile, you also have to take an unrelated course - Technical Filmmaking Two - (don't worry, you don't have to have passed TF1) - at the same time as PF1.
So in order to take a single module to make your own short film, you have to take SW1, SW2, PF1 and TF1.
PF1 has just finished, and the only conceivable reason - having just had the experience - that anyone would ever, ever take it is to do PF2. It feels oddly like I've just passed a gang initiation or a fraternity hazing that nobody had the good manners to declare was even going on.
Meanwhile, at the hall of justice my admittedly low contributions to extracurricular work have been systematically airbrushed out of the picture in the name of good press.
This means that I leave this semester with a fifteen minute technical exercise - the filmmaking equivalent of measuring your dick in a public place - two lackadaisical music videos, and a powerful wish to take the film theory path instead of the practical path, strewn as the latter is with bullshit, badly-run courses, and a basic inability to actually let filmmakers be creative in any way possible.
And now, just for laughs, there's a five month break before the next year during one of the worst times for employment possible, where the choices are either hibernate or sell my dignity to the Jobcenter Plus for dole money.
When I stood outside, earlier, in the crisp, perfect evening breeze, I felt a momentary peacefulness, because all the shit that I and my fellow students have had to put up with is over, now, for another twenty weeks.
Now, I'm thinking; next year, students are going to pay over 250% what I pay at the moment for tuition fees. If they have to take SW1, SW2, PF1, and TF1 just to have the opportunity to make their own films, then God help them, frankly.
I still maintain my position that this course, right now, is cheaper than equipment hire and comes with a pre-built contacts creation engine, a large, mostly free-to-use set for a campus, and access to premium software. But when, for this most recent semester, the course doesn't actually count as a tangible benefit to attending the university, where does that leave you, exactly?
Diary of a Mature Student: Aphasia means never having to sorry you're say
Believe it or not, in this ongoing attempt to add more letters to my name, there are dark times.
This is not about deadlines, or tutors' office hours, or the rising cost of petrol - at least, the last one, only tangentially - but more about the rising cost on the people I depend upon to continue doing this course.
Here's the thing; I have almost no tangible assets right now. Seriously - people my age, from my generation, whatever, tend to have mortgages, cars, children.
I have a large collection of films on DVD, a collection of unrelated props, and everything else has been invested in, frankly, the space between my ears.
Which, no matter what QVC might try to tell you, you can't sell.
Every now and then it catches me; mostly due to a popular social networking site, where I can see all the people on my electronic acquaintances list telling little one-line stories about weddings, pregnancies, successes, failures, etc.
I, by contrast, spend my days surrounded by tweenagers with postive attitudes but not very much in the way of interpersonal skills (except in the odd case) whose only real worries are whether the SLC will pay them their latest installment of insitutionalised debt so they can pay their fees / rent / pizza bills.
In a way, this makes me feel better, because I love my home, and, ninety to ninety-five percent of my time, I love my life.
But Academia - capitalisation intentional - is such a strange world, even stranger, arguably, than politics. The students are only working towards high grades not out of pride, but for theoretical personal gain - but these marks are awarded arbitrarily by a person of authority who may or may not be being judged on their performance via these grades, which is possibly the only reason there's any kind of Second Marking instituted, because otherwise it's performance-related-pay-rigging on a massive scale.
These tutors don't even necessarily want to be there, because hey - who really likes their job. Except most people's jobs don't mean they only have to post something like four to eight office hours a week during which time they may - may - be available to speak to lowly undergraduates.
The rest of the time is filled up with, and I'm assuming based on Piled Higher and Deeper, supervising research students (although I've yet to meet one on my course, but that doesn't mean they're not hiding somewhere), writing academic papers, being on 'research leave', and generally being nebulous. Add to this between six to sixteen hours of lectures and seminars a week, and marking the results of said seminars, and you still get nowhere near a forty-hour working week, which is what I was used to.
(Well, 37.5 hours, but let's not split hairs.)
I love my faculty - they've always been curteous and helpful whenever I've needed help - but I cannot work out how, exactly, the academic world works. My institution is amazing, but it's not exactly top of the barrel - so I get the feeling that some of them are just serving their time out until something better comes along, whether it means making an actual feature film or moving on to a different tenure or becoming a professor somewhere...
In academia, it's topsy-turvy; bad students make for bad tutors, because why should they bother caring for the top 20% when the bottom 80% are just ticking along until the day they get the certificate and booted out into the real world?
So here's the controversial thing. Enhanced - i.e. increased by around 250 - 300% - tuition fees may not be a bad thing. At the moment the university system feels like at best vocational training (for the majority of practical courses; theoretical courses tend, it seems, to turn out teachers) and at worst like a handy place for parents to put their wayward children for three years, to be sold into debt by the government and the SLC and, crucially, not appear on the unemployment statistics. In this light, New Labour's pledge to get 50% of the young population attending university seems less like an altruistic gester and more like guaranteeing future revenue on student loans that will continue to rise unless paid off, which is increasingly unlikely given the employment market.
Higher tuition fees mean thinking twice about courses, and places, and asking whether you or your offspring really need a degree course that's going to top out at something like £28,000 in fees before you even include living costs.
This in turn will probably precipitate a dropoff - don't misunderstand me, there'll still be people attending for the sake of attending, but more fool them. At the same time, the dropoff may not actually cause any woe fees-wise, because one student will be paying as much as three used to.
This is controversial for me because, well, I was lucky. On the first merry-go-round thanks to some circumstances my Local Education Authority paid my tuition fees - the princely sum of something line £1,050 a year. The classes were huge, the courses were amazingly boring up until the final year, and things were difficult.
This time around, I have a sponsor, so I'm lucky again. But class sizes are smaller than my previous higher education iteration - not by much, but if you take certain routes you can end up in classes of 100+ students, but if you go down other routes it's usually between 20 to 40 per class, split into groups or seminars.
Next year, I expect that number to be even smaller.
And, I would like to think, numbers for the Open University will rise. They may, they may not, but I hope they do, because the OU are boss.
Prospective parents; prospective students. Look at it this way. If you can put up with the children living at home / if you can put up with living with your parents instead of moving out, you can get a degree course for a massively lower rate, because you pay by module and could, if you worked your teenage socks off, finish a degree course in two years.
Their courses are refined every year, their tutors - although you'll most likely never see one - are mostly lovely - and you can pick and choose as you like, or even drop out for up to, I believe, 8 years before coming back.
My name is Eton Crow*, and I Endorse The Open University.
Take the £9,000 a year you'd spend, plus accommodation, plus living expenses, and spend half that much on a distance-learning degree. Then put the other half away for a mortgage, or a fast car, or a kilo of class A drugs, whichever appeals.
You won't meet all the amazing people you'd probably meet, you won't have the University Experience, you won't have the Independence and the joy of finally Moving Out, but you'll be a lot better off financially...
... Of course, money isn't everything. But it helps.
For some reason, I've been feeling reflective lately. So let's talk about burning bridges.
When I was younger - yes, before anyone says it, so much younger than today - I burnt bridges with people over the slightest provocation, with distinct, lasting intent. Now that the first - and possibly second and third, frankly - flushes of youth, I look back and I see all these bridges, in their various stages of crispiness, and well... It makes me think.
Most obvious are the - and we'll be speaking metaphorically from hereon in, fact fans, because much as we all like fire, I'm not an arsonist - burnt stubs and stumps where bridges used to be. They stopped smoking a long time ago, and now the river passes under them, free and clear of anyone trying to cross. These are, paradoxically, the easiest to deal with, because outside of some miraculous Group Therapy session, they're never going to be rebuilt, and often for good reason.
Next are the bridges that are still smoking, and that have structural problems and integrity issues which render them uncrossable. These are slightly more problematic because, in theory, they could be repaired, given enough time and effort, but in the majority of cases what's on the other side isn't worth the time or, frankly, the effort. They stand as a testimony to those times when I thought it was best to simply cut contact with someone and just leave it at that, in the hope that the friendship would atrophy and wither away peacefully.
Sidebar; sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. In a couple of cases there was a period of six months to a year where the other party, not understanding my whys or wherefores, tried to mend their side of the bridge, but always attempted to do so by imposing what they wanted onto the situation and expecting me to just adapt, compromise, and roll with the - again, metaphorical - punches. Which falls, psychologically, for me in the realm of things I don't work well with - adaptation, yes, being told what to do, not so much. After a year or so in both major cases, both parties gave up, and while my side of the bridge still occasionally smokes, theirs has given in to nature and mouldered or rotted away. Which is paradoxically for the best.
Worst are the third class of bridges; those made of charcoal, either wholly or at least in places. These are the ones that haven't been definitively burnt, but that I've managed, through stupidity or lack of foresight or any number of youthful indiscretions, to set little fires to without burning them. The contact is still there, the friendship is still there, but oftentimes it's as bitter as charcoal, and to cross the bridge is to risk breaking more and more off of it for less and less prospective return. Some of these bridges I've repaired, and made them travel-safe once more. Some of them still smolder. Some of them can't be fixed, and to cross them once more might mean breaking them. If you like, these are the break in case of emergency bridges; cross them at your peril, and only if the reward outweighs the risk.
Next to these are the bridges lost to natural wasteage; contacts not renewed, people forgotten, or else friends on a popular social networking site that are just that, electronic links with nothing behind them but some vague memories of oh yeah that time three-four-five-six years ago when that thing happened that we all laughed about. These are bridges covered in moss and wreathed in fog, and, again, cross them at your peril, because a refusal often disappoints.
On my own little island - although of course no man is an island, but let's move on before the jokes start - there are as many bridges as there are people who were more than a passing aquaintances.
The ones I am grateful for, and that are in short supply, are the well-maintained, waxed-and-polished renewable oak bridges of the social world, trodden regularly and maintained as necessary. These are, to repeat the point, in truly short supply, because that's how I've let them get over the years. One or two of them are even more or less fireproof, but none of them survive without maintenance of one kind or another.
If this seems (a) unduly serious and (b) not that much to do with studying, bear this in mind; something the older and arguably more mature like to say is that the friends you make at university are with you for life. That does make it sound more like a sentence than a promise, but I'm here to say that it is, like all truisms, not necessarily true. I have two people from the first time on the merry-go-round who I still count as good, close friends, who have the best-maintained bridge in the metaphorical country and a further two who I could count on as good friends even though I'm not sure they think I've actually changed on any significant personal level for over a decade.
(Well, hey, maybe I haven't.)
That's it. Out of the hundreds - maybe thousands - of people met on the merry-go-round, two are perfect friends, two are good friends, and there are maybe another twenty to thirty I could rustle up as friends-at-a-distance.
On the flip side of the coin, there are exes, people who I done wronged, people who just think - or, more accurately, thought - of me as a playful, woeful fool, self-centred and self-aggrandising, because, hey, I was.
So I see the people on the merry-go-round at the moment, and I think; in ten years time, maybe one in twenty of you will remember my name, or my face, if I'm not careful enough in harvesting the growing trees of these friendships to make the bridges strong enough to last.
One thing that's useful, though, is that the class sizes for this are about two to three times smaller than last time, though, so for better or worse we're one unhappy, extended family group of people in the same boat at the same time. We're in each others' pockets, essentially, at least for the next three weeks, because next year, things get different...
Sidebar; I'm dropping the Our Director Writes from now on, because frankly I'm the only one left at Eton Crow for various reasons until around November.
I've mentioned this before, but every now and then I have an urge to 'adopt' a movie, in that it's the kind of movie that not many people will see, or the kind of movie that's so bad it's good or fun, or... Just because.
Sound reasoning, I know.
But watch this:
Now do me a favour, and watch it again:
(I know I could have just redirected you up there, but hey, it seemed funnier to double-post.)
The Big Bang makes no sense in any kind of rational world. I would have loved to have been in on the pitching session; give credit to the kind of person who thought "Let's mix Double Indemnitywith Quantum Physics and a splash of L.A. Confidential and just, y'know, run with it."
And someone on the other side of the room pipes up with "I know! Antonio Banderas would be perfect for that role!"
How exactly does this happen? And how many Kiss Kiss Bang BOOM puns can people wring out of the "P.I. meets supercollider" genre? Wait - that's probably the only one...
But... It intrigues me, even if in all likelihood it's not going to be, shall we say, very good. And intrigue is worth it's weight, or maybe at least worth the wait...
Diary of a Mature Student: Post Crunch-Week, Pre-Total Crunch
So Slump Week is over.
This is not necessarily a good thing.
Slump Week, as discussed, was the time when study fatigue starts to kick in, because it's all learning and no application.
However, thanks to the vagaries of scheduling, slump week was immediately followed by Crunch Week, which contained no less than five deadlines across three courses co-inciding.
And, of course, if any one of these deadlines gets pushed even slightly, you end up pulling all-nighters, and that, to be frank and speaking from recent experience, is a young person's game.
I'm ready to admit to pulling a couple of all-nighters during my first time on the merry-go-round, but - crucially - not for study. I like being a creature of deadlines, don't get me wrong, but if you're still drinking coffee and cursing like a sailor at 3a.m. the night before something is due, then boy howdy, you need some kind of time management thing going on.
And so it was that on Wednesday this week, following a mandatory all-nighter, I ended up driving home at 4a.m. for the first time in, like, well, ever.
Driving at four in the morning after an all-day-all-night work assignment is kind of bizarre, because I was too wired to sleep but too terrified of falling asleep at the wheel to do anything other than ride a strange adrenaline rush that made navigating the dark, orange-hued and, crucially, wet roads home a very, very strange experience.
Where I'm studying has a kind of weird kink, in that it runs the two semester program - much like the first place I attended - but with a weird Easter Holidays thing built in, whereby in week eight you take a two week break in order to come back for weeks nine through twelve.
It is, as I say, a bit weird.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for holidays, but like I said above, I'm a creature of deadlines, the main one of which that is occupying my concern at the moment lies after the two week break during which you can, crucially, do almost nothing in terms of work towards it.
This strikes me as odd. It's the opposite of pleasure delaying; it's anxiety-prolonging, stress-increasing and generally ever-so-slightly sadistic. It's not like the students don't get a five month summer break, after all; so to dump two weeks into the schedule two-thirds of the way into the second semester seems like some weird causal hangover from The Way Things Were Always Done back in the day.
In Real World terms - and let's not forget, these courses are supposed to be preparing the underprepared for the Real World, or at least something like it - this makes no sense, unless, frankly, you plan on being a teacher, in which case it makes perfect sense. But here's the rub; for a film course, almost none of the students will end up getting any job other than being a runner after graduation, because of the 'experience' conundrum - i.e. you have to have experience to get the job, but you have to have had a job to get the experience - which means that they go from one broken facsimile of real life to another with, it is devoutly hoped, no waiting.
This is the equivalent of spending three years at business school and then becoming a supermarked cashier for the experience. Don't get me wrong, there is a degree of sense in putting the young, recently-graduated through a difficult job - it winnows out the minnows, it's cheap, easy labour, and it allows those who shine to shine - but if I were a young student faced with this, I can't help but feel I'd be thinking well... what's the point?
Don't mistake me - from the point of view of an Older Person, I have a vague plan as to What To Do Next following this degree, but nothing more concrete than vagueness, because the way the world is at the moment it doesn't feel like making plans is the smart thing to do. No, as Cayce Pollard would have it, it's all about the jack moves...
There's something I've been meaning to write about for a while now, and it's what could technically be referred to as the Dewey Paradox;
The level of activity of a student library exists in direct relation to the approaching deadlines
In week zero, campus is empty other than staff members (although not faculty members, necessarily, because... why?), P.h.D students, researchers and the few dedicated or bored students who like the peace and quiet.
Week zero is a magical place. Reports are even cited of unicorns emerging from their burrows to take advantage of the opportunity to frolic across the main campus square before the students arrive, although this could be put down to either the faculty sense of humour, the prevalence of psychedelic drugs in some areas, or simply overdoses of the bad coffee served by the on-campus shops.
Week one isn't too different; traditionally an introduction week, week one is designed to act as an academic airlock, equalising the pressure between moving back from wherever home is and starting the semester anew. No courses have yet pulled the devious trick of making week one actually key to the following twelve to fourteen, because, in all probability, it wouldn't work; attendance is traditionally high, however.
This is because, largely, the dropoff begins in week two. Some people attend week one as a taster for the course, knowing that they can sign off at any point before the end of week two, so that accounts for some natural drop. Other drops are accounted for by people being able to access the necessary materials online (and so not needing the lecture), being ill, being unable to attend, or being lazy.
This reaches an apex at week six, for no reason other than it's traditionally slump week. Last year, week one of a mandatory course yielded 140 students. By week six, this was down to 60.
Fortunately, this is the most impressive dropoff so far. (But give it time).
So if you're ever bored, and want to find out how close a deadline is, visit the library. Granted, in this brave new world, people have a tendency of downloading the books, or just using internet sources, but there still seems to be no substitute for filling a room with hundreds of books then letting stressed students loose therein. Apparently, it's just fun.
Every now and then I actually forget that I'm surrounded by people a decade younger than me for at least ten to twenty hours a week. I was brought up with a fairly simple outlook vis-a-vis age; I was taught, or at least learnt, that you don't treat people differently because of it. Sure, the younger are less experienced - sometimes - but apart from that, a person's a person, and the number's kind of irrelevant.
Thus, when someone wants respect because of their age - old or young - I tended to think, well, huh. But that's a different line of thinking.
No, what I'm considering now is the amount of truly stupid shit I did when I was a student on the first ride on the degree merry-go-round. I won't bore you with the funny but l-o-n-g details, because we all (most of us, anyway) do stupid things in our youth.
But it does leave me with a quandary.
Do I warn someone who's about to do something stupid?
If I do, there's chances that it (a) won't alter anything, (b) will make me look like I'm interfering, and (c) that the people in question won't make the mistake that they need to learn from.
If I don't, I have to step aside and watch as people make all the mistakes they have to learn from, but, crucially, they have to make the mistake in order to do the learning. And it's kind of heartbreaking.
And I do attend a course where dressing a coursemate in a neon pink bandolier, two tutus, and a matching neon pink bandana for an assignment is considered a sane and rational act.
Making a film is, by definition, neither a sane nor a rational act. It's the imposition of order on a fundamentally disordered system; trying to bring together cast, crew, location, equipment and mentality followed by months of editing in order to create something people will either not pay attention to or will forget, if not tomorrow then soon, and for the rest of their lives until they remember it again, for whatever reason.
It feels a lot like that's how culture works - people forget until they remember, and often enough remembering is triggered by something media or culture-related anyway, so...
I'm having a good week, anyway, in case it's not entirely evident. The strange thing about most university courses is that the longer you stay on them, the less tuition you receive; the first year is bootstrapping, designed to bring everyone up to an approximation of the same level.
But here's the weird thing about slump week - traditionally, the first week in the second half of the semester - it affects everyone differently. It's all about the assimilation of information, you see; after six to eight weeks of constantly being told to learn new things, the course becomes less a matter of research and more a matter of neuroplasticity,in that you have to be able to take up what you learn, otherwise it's just waves crashing on a beach.
After the six to eight, it becomes less an issue of learning and more a matter of survival, because suddenly instead of a theoretical exercise you're actually expected to put what you've learned into practice, with the aim of being assessed not necessarily on your ability, but more on whether or not you've been paying attention.
Slump week is nearly over, but that's not necessarily a good thing, because of what comes next...
and just, y'know, run with it."