A little checkpoint on the university progress. I've had the first of five tutorials now.
Up to this point it's been a "phoney course" in WW2 terminology. I had a pack of books, a website log-in, a few downloads and software installs ... and that was it. The course started on the seventh. Yesterday, the seventeenth, was the first tutorial, and the preparation was only basically getting a computer set up. I looked at the first assignment, and it told me to try the relevant computer-marked exercises first, so I looked online, and the exercises won't be available until the twenty-first. So I wondered exactly what I was supposed to be doing.
Well, it turns out I should be partway through unit two by now. The glossy books, which looked to me like useful things to refer to, turn out to BE the course. I'm actually supposed to DO the little tests that appear every other page - they're not just rhetorical devices. Oops. I suspect I'm not temperamentally suited to formal education. I have become accustomed to absorbing information as required, and actual work looks like hardship ... or maybe I do have student attitudes?
But the tutorial was interesting, not because of the content (it was all about the background aspects of the course, and no mention of the content of the course), but because of the people and so on. The tutor is a nice guy, quite traditional but easy-going, the classroom is in a childcare department and decorated accordingly, and eight of nineteen students turned up. Most of the others live miles away - mind you, the guy next to me had travelled about two hours.
As might be expected on a distance course, the main point in common between us was an attempt to better ourselves. Most people seemed to have a feeling that they had so far settled for something short of their ambitions, and this was a step towards doing something about it. There were delivery-drivers and technicians, and one woman with two jobs (full-time and part-time) and two children as well as the course. One guy was a herdsman (his description) who wanted to learn about computers before robots were installed to do the milking of his cows, another worked in military security and is apparently one of the ones who gets stick whenever a laptop is left on a train as appears in the news with monotonous regularity, and another writes blurb for eBay. All reminded me of the later stages of my education before, once it was optional, in that there was a set of people together who might not be natural at what's on the agenda, but they're going to give it a good try. I felt a bit of a dilettante by comparison, just as I did before.
Two of the eight people also live near me, so just maybe that might be a social link too. We shall see.
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2 comments:
Nothing can beat the chance to learn with a good teacher and interesting fellow students. I hope you’ll enjoy the whole experience.
Edwin Muir (18887-1959), the Orkney-born Scottish poet, had to leave school at fourteen and never had the chance to go to university. In 1950, however, he became Warden of Newbattle Abbey College, a college for working class men south of Edinburgh. Muir loved teaching and encouraging people from similar backgrounds to himself, and after his death another Orkney-born poet and Newbattle student, George Mackay Brown (1921-1996), wrote a one-man play about Muir ('Edward Muir and the Labyrinth', March 1987) in which he has him saying about teaching his students:
"I try to encourage them always .... Never be hard on them. Never let them feel they’re wasting their time. My time as well. The whole treasury of literature is there for them to ransack. Open their minds to the old wisdom, goodness, beauty. Arm them against gray impersonal powers. They press in on every side. More and more."
Just so!
Oh dear I could have/should have told you that the glossy books contained the course and had things to do in them. Oh well no doubt you got by anyway. But I guess THEY should have told you.
You have reminded me - maybe the OU can be part of my 'get out of the rat race before it kills you' package - I could be both a student and a tutor (on different courses of course)
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