University of Glasgow blether thread

At the risk of making you all insanely jealous, I don't really have to worry too much about the library (although for everyone else's sake I'd still like to do what I can to make the place a good place to work in again) as I have my own office on campus. New i5 computers, 19" display, printer, scanner and a few shelves, filing cabinets. The view from my window is the QM fire escape though, so I'm sure I'm still deserving of some sympathy...

...about as much sympathy as I give to the second years' essays I most recently marked. Seriously, if you're the kind of person that thinks citing infoplease.com at the end of second year is a good idea, you really should have anticapted the E that came your way.

An E?! Ooooh


I like the library when it's quiet Strathclyde's was really depressing.

It's almost as bad as citing wikipedia...

RANT ALERT: The library is no longer a good place to study, it's full of people who are there because their conscience tells them they should be, but don't really have any intention of using the resources for more than about five minutes every hour. I reckon the average productivity of people in the library is about 20%. Went to pick up a book, literally the majority of people on level eight at a PC were on Facebook, iPlayer, Amazon or generally not typing an essay/taking notes/reading a pdf. Maybe I just caught them all on a hard-earned 11.42am break or just happened across the one row of PCs where the lazy people were sitting*.

Not so sure about that. When I'm on fb in the library it's normally because I have fb groups for all my courses and it's useful looking at questions there etc.

But then again I normally take my laptop to the library

RANT ALERT:

had a wee argument with a girl over a computer. so frustrating.


haha i'm pretty sure i was seated pretty close to celtic anthony on the 7th floor today.

You weren't, sorry. I decided to go for post-exam pints rather than studying.

You should have said hi, anyway. That would have been funny.

I did.

Interesting fact: Glasgow University, 1991 (the year before polytechnics became universities) had a total of 14,000 students, of which 1,900 were postgraduates and under 20% were non-Scottish. In 2011 it has 26,500 students, of which 6,500 are postgrads and 40% are non-Scottish. My own take on this (and the take of at least one Prof who has been there since the 1970s) is that standards are going down, not up, in the sense that for every extra very good student they get, they add two to the ever-lengthening tail of zoomers, and rather than a seminar of 7-8 students with one tube, there's 12 students with four that would be lucky to say one smart thing all term.

...and, according to a recent table, this is a place that's 11th out of 129 institutions for entry standards. I often wonder what it's like at Bolton or somewhere. Are they trying to stick pencils up their noses?

Could be worse mind you. My experience of an un-named university in a small town known for golf on the east coast is even worse. Lots of students with lots of As who went to a school where they were expected to get even more As and thus actually are the stupidest ones from their peer group at school, ending up there instead of where their cleverer mates went. Bloody good education, but no brain cells. Takes less to get them to write polished essays, but twice the effort to get them to use the grey matter in a semi-useful way.

To which, I cite this: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=419733

"So we have to put more effort into recruiting overprivileged students who aren't bright or diligent enough to get three As despite all the money poured into their private education but who manage to scrape two As and a B. They are probably a lot less sharp than the students who get an A and two Bs in struggling comprehensives and come to us, but needs must. Where can we find the recruiting team to send out to the fee-paying schools?"

Nail-on-head.

But aye, while most of my students were at least competent, there are some absolute nutters out there.

It really frustrates me in seminars, particularly History ones. It was worst in first year - there'd be about three of us that would ever say anything. The rest just turned up and sat there doing nothing. It hasn't been as bad this year, probably because everyone has to do a seminar paper so everyone has to talk for at least one week, but I find it really frustrating when I'm interested and I've done the reading and can talk, I hope intelligently, about the topics and no one else says anything at all.

Only one of my tutorials has even been graded and I think that it's come as quite a shock to certain ( the majority) people. Tutorial preparation should have some sort of weighting on the final grade in all courses tbh.

All our English Lit ones are and I think that's why some people are too afraid to speak out. They'd rather say nothing than be 'wrong' (when there isn't even a right or wrong answer).

It really frustrates me in seminars, particularly History ones. It was worst in first year - there'd be about three of us that would ever say anything. The rest just turned up and sat there doing nothing. It hasn't been as bad this year, probably because everyone has to do a seminar paper so everyone has to talk for at least one week, but I find it really frustrating when I'm interested and I've done the reading and can talk, I hope intelligently, about the topics and no one else says anything at all.

I didn't let my first years away with keeping quiet. If they hadn't said anything in a while, I'd ask them what they thought about something. If they didn't know, I'd ask them about what it said in the reading on that point in its most general terms. If they didn't know that, I'd ask them what they knew about the reading. If it was nothing, then I'd call them out on why they thought it was OK to not bother with doing the work. Crashing and burning infront of ten of your peers usually gets some sort of response from people that aren't complete idiots, and they tended to pick up from there. None of the classes I've taught (except a really, really dismal bunch at Caledonian) have been too guilty of it.

We gave ESH students a 1200 word paper due at the end of week two based on a critical review of two journal articles that disagreed with each other. This was 12 days after being assigned it. We lost around twice as many students as usual as some just didn't fancy having to work. One even came to my office to tell me that 'this isn't history', which was amusing. The papers were of a pretty low quality, but the scare factor meant that the essays we received six weeks later were a lot better than first year essays usually were, so I think it's a worthwhile experiment. It's also good to mark up essays that show thought and effort and go hard on carelessness and laziness. I've handed out low Cs and sometimes Ds for essays that it's clear the student just isn't trying very hard. When they can't proofread three pages of text before handing it in and get everything from the introductions in two books, they should expect low grades.

There are a lot of tutors though that don't know how to teach seminars. I probably talk more than I should, but I often play devil's advocate to lose arguments by setting up controversial theories (like Imperialism being a good thing for the natives) that gets the students to engage with the point. They always have opinions on people, so getting them to bitch about what they think about JFK is sometimes an avenue into discussion. This being said, the awkward silence can be a good tactic by tutors. No one likes them, so being prepared to sit there and not provide answers until someone uses their brain and lungs can work well in making students realise that I won't be handing out answers on a plate and if they want help they have to work a bit for it. I might be wrong, but I strongly suspect that at least some of them might be grateful that I got them into good habits of reading and writing before honours rather than allow them through unhindered to get Cs and Ds in honours.

I'm quite lucky, I think. I've had good seminar tutors on the whole. I really like the history department at Glasgow, it's the main reason I'm now going to do single honours. Need to finalise my course choices though - picking 16 courses is hard work, though mostly because there's so many I want to do putting them in order of preference is proving impossible.