to expect a Comparative Literature student to like reading?

[NadineBaggott]

On Weakest Link last evening there was a young girl doing a degree course in comparative literature.

Anne: so you like reading?
Girl: no, not really
Anne: so how does that work?
Girl: I use the internet.

I made my main decision around the age of 12/13 so wasn't a business/science person.
was several things.I disliked being told what to think.
Science told me I was wrong, but literary types told me that I had to agree with them.

Actually I "dabble" in real science and "real" writing.

I see most arts as hobbies. As it turns out I can't paint or make music, and am impressed by people who can do either.

I was good at English, indeed am regularly pestered by people demanding to pay me to write things for them. I used to mention this freely, but now usually don't mention it much because it really gets to people who studied the subject, but weren't good enough to make it pay.

I also came to really dislike the wilful ignorance of many arty types. There's huge piles of things I haven't bothered to learn, or couldn't learn even if I tried. Many arties are positively proud of such defects.
English lit bothered me the most, presumably because of my talent in that area. It was smug, pathologically consensus driven and panderered to the aristocratic fallcy as one of it's cores.
There was the ononistic search for "what the authort was really saying".
The "scientific" aspect of me took the trouble to read what authors actually thought themselves. Can't do that for Shakespeare, but you can for many others.
If anything there was a negative correlation, and it became very suspicious to me that in no text I could find did the "academic" bother to actually do prper research, merely cutting and pasting text to make himself look clever.

what is 'ononistic'? my online dictionary doesn't have an entry

it has one for onanistic but I don't think you mean that!

Dc if you disagree with the tenets of literary theory or criticism, part of the process of studying it (at degree level and above anyway) is to be able to articulate and argue against established positions.

Cutting and pasting wouldn't do it for anyone at that level.

Also creative or journalistic freelance/paid writing is not English literature, which is what we're talking about?

Marina you may be right. LION is so useful for quick/home access & I certainly rely on it at times- however I'm not even getting first year students who are able to use that intelligently- it's more like quotes from Sparknotes.com (attributed to Sparknotes.com), and that will be the only evidence of any research in the whole piece. Grim- and as I've said before these students are not thick. I just have to actually steer them directly to BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY.

yes Marina- school library funding/access is so very poor and computer skills seem to be being overemphasised somewhat.
Must get ds a thesaurus (no rush he's only 3)

Usborne do a smashing one

Further education today seems like a conveyor belt. Going to Uni appears to be one of the things you do before you die and if this student is typical there doesn't seem to be any passion in learning anymore.

& you're quite right, encouraging 'reading beyond' is nigh on impossible.

If any of my students do this is immediately alerts me that they probably have a previous higher degree (I teach mostly mature students). They just do not seem to come out of secondary level education with that sense of books as things to be explored.

Actually, my 'self-taught' students (without A-level or equivalent) are often MORE open to this- which says something to me about schooling narrowing down students' ideas of what research means.

Bit of a sweeping generalisation there nadine!

It's the unceasing march of instrumental rationality dontcha know

I don't believe this person is typical though. It is a worrying trend , but most of the young people I know, through my work and outside, are very passionate about their university experiences, luckily

I love mature students! Always, always more demanding/appreciative of the library, more open-minded - bring em on

Nadine some do definitely have passion- a lot of my studnets are returners to education from work though, so they have extra motivation.

However, while teaching BA law at another London uni without so many mature students, I was quite shocked at the conveyor belt attitude. The students (those who turned up to tutorials at all) seemed to see learning as an unfortunate necessary step to making lots of money as lawyers, and that was it. There may have been passionate, interested students in there but it was hard to pick them out.

I think staff and students in a lot of HEIs are victims of a culture of pack them in, true. I worry very much indeed about the learning environment for students at most of the new universities in Inner London, for example.
It must be very demoralising to have worked hard (if in a very narrow sense ) to get your grades only to find seminars for 300 plus students and little personal tutorial time allocated. And one close friend just threw in the towel in disgust after years of being obliged to teach in this manner. She was a really gifted teacher, too

Marina it was an Inner London university. Say no more.

Very demoralising for the students I agree, which hardly encourages motivation.

We have such a "campus" nearby and a more depressing place full of hacked-off looking students it is hard to imagine.
And what inevitably happens IME is they vent their frustrations on staff who ARE around - Student Support and Learning Resources
Big staff turnover and burnout in that sector. I would never go back.

Unfortunately it seems that a lot of school education these days is not about learning, but about learning how to pass specific exams. There seems to be neither the motivation nor the time to widen horizons. Very sad, and nothing like the teaching I experienced.

I agree that the way teachers are required to teach (and friends who are teachers agree with this) is part of the problem, along with the idea of turning pupils into 'consumers', and having targets for everything. A former schools inspector I know has left the state school system in disgust at what she sees as dumbing down.

A couple of years back I did an OU sicence course. The people who went to the tutorials were a wide age group from a variety of backgrounds, with this in common: we were all there out of choice, were interested in the subject, and were fitting in studying around the rest of our lives. The youngest person in the group was a 17 year old who had dropped out of 6th form college because the way things were taught failed to engage him intellectually: he felt that at school all he had to do was memorize things that were spoon fed, and that thinking outside what was required for the exam was not quite actively discouraged butb not far off, and that was really boring. On the OU course, he felt that he was treated like a person with a brain, and the subject matter was presented in way that was stimulating and required personl input.

If the national curriculum and the way it is taught is so geared towards passing exams, because the schools are really focussed on league tables and not on really stimulating young people to want to find out more, then it is missing the point completely.

Oh, and a friend who teaches French is still trying to get to grips with how to teach a language without teaching grammar. This would probably not be so much of a problem if English grammar were taught, but it is not, so she is still grappling with the problem of how to teach kids to conjugate a verb, when they don't know what a verb is!

absolutely agree- everything is so hideously standardised. I worry for my kids, this can only get worse in post-Blair corporate Britain.

Heard something really disturbing on R4 recently about French teaching and how languages are now considered 'too hard' by a lot of schools. It's frightening frankly.

Hasn't French always been too hard ?
I was one of the best in my class at French, but no one will ever confuse me for a French person
I did a little schooling in France, and in English they were doing much the same books we were doing in English our native language.

I've always been ambivalent about the role of French in schools. It's far from the most useful language to learn, chosen apparently because we have a lot of French teachers. To an extent I'm not sure it matters since most kids have always failed abjectly to learn it anyway.

If French is too hard, then what hope have the next generation got of learning languages that would be really useful in today's world, such as Chinese, Russian, Arabic or Urdu, all of which involve mastering a different alphabet or script system, in addition to grammar?

Actually, I think foreign language teaching should be compulsory in primary schools - the younger children are introduced to a new language, the easier it is for them to learn (and can vouch for that from personal experience).