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COLLEGE INDEPENDENT 'ALTERNATIVE PROSPECTUS' GUIDE
Part 2.
This is continued from
http://www.webspawner.com/users/newone042/index.html
DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE. TAKE NO REGARD OF PUBLISHED UNIVERSITY TABLES OR ASSESSMENT RESULTS.
I, at times duped, often found the staff's behaviour (mostly "the course") very funny, something to do with thinking not quite consciously that one has to laugh and it might be all you can do, where this is obviously being illustrated another time - as a bonus. As beyond the immediate reaction, this remained the only truth, here also where a flight impulse was not to be expected. I found that there was a clear and separate and hysterical appeal, here to the part of a duped human who can't in fact believe the situation and who genuinely is moved to fits by Acorn Antiques. Often it seemed that something this inexpressibly funny, while hung over and hypnotized by a lecturer’s continuing reading aloud and remedial conjectures (seemingly for another non musical music student who knew no music and professed to hate music, musicians and high culture) must be better than real life. This was so especially as in how it seemed from a quick further removed view: that through the sometimes appearing real awareness of incredulity, fear and confusion there is not anything going anywhere out there for nineteen year olds. I mean, nothing anywhere in the country. Abroad seemed to have vanished. Trust envisaged died. Although the real reason why I stayed is trust in other students, as I shall recount.
Funnily, aside, in my last year one of the lecturers on the course told me in private that, "you know, the students aren't very intelligent in this part, in this part of the university."[?] For "this part of the university" it was a vast understatement anyway. Although, there was no degree, why should there be any good students or any students trying, but he seemed to be trying to suggest something else first. Something else as well?
After the start of the first year, something of a mock battle-style "we are here" attitude arose from some students, this soon overcoming most in some fashion, though often inconspicuous to the unconcerned, aside from in being no pretension to any real standards. It’s serious because its both all there was and, one might imagine, all there could be. But one might imagine also theses could be being done by some in private study, and that others would come around, and great things might be happening in other subjects although no-one, actually, was personally doing anything at all in this one. No reaction might be surprising or unworthy here. Who knows?
The result of all this that I was aware of, stalling reckoning on psycholgical effects for the moment, came as only being generally that personally I didn’t take "degree contexts" seriously, however much I would have loved to have. I was kind of stunned: a kind of stunning which lasts for years. This means I could not hold in real life for many years the devastating, destrtuctive, excessively massive reality of this siuation. I was numbed and brainwashed, and in hypnosis. Even contemporary with this, within my complete, forgetting unawareness and everyday continuance as if all was natural, I began to develop a large quota of distant but significant self-blame which came from not doing the work I began to calculate I should be doing in such a student centred place though which, not quite consciously again, began to include the act of going to lectures and being there. This may indicate, it ocurring beyond quantifiably, how real and normal things often seemed to me.
[Re: "Honours Years"]
There were no lectures at all timetabled in the last two years of the four. In the final two years there was "teaching" only five out of ten weeks of each term. Every full second week during the full year was "free" completely and utterly. The third term would have about three "teaching weeks" in total [I must put inverted commas here]. The maximum attended "teaching" during each of these terms in the final years was up to two hours a day during the "tutorial" weeks wit hthe rest of the day free, or there would be a day "off" when two subjects were timetabled on the same day of the week. I have described the most generous honours years timetabling, as some honours years courses had no "teaching" timetabled for weeks and even months.
These were not the personal dissertation options, nor the instrumental / vocal performance options where no teaching from the "Uni. of Ed." was given. For performance it was up to the student to hire a private performance tutor for roughly one hour every fortnight as the course allowed. Five private lessons every three months or so were allowed for in four years, and for two years, with the same provision also for a keyboard insturment. But this was not mandatory nor checked, nor cared about slightly. Why should it be? It is out of place. Some students took initial lessons after beginning and perhaps a handful, maybe one or two lessons, a year after this. This was their choice. Some students in this small department took no further private teaching over four years after introductory lessons at the beginning of first year. I noted one of these students had had next to no classical music training at all before going to Edinburgh. He played blues on saxophone and improvised only, of the standard of a student of a couple of years. Though this student dragged out a one page long grade four or five standard piece, I believe his only classical piece or one of a few and less than five maybe ever but certainly until ge "graduated", for the only mandatory recital within four years, of less than ten minutes. There were lots of accompaniment passages. I believe he had played this in the audition for admittance; and he made no mistakes in the recital.
Going back to the "teaching", there was more teaching to be found in the one subject mentioned which was without any timetabled teaching of any sort in my third year directly from the middle of the first term to the end of the last, than there was in a good number of other subjects.
After some introductory sessions, this one distinctly remedial honours year course I took in my final year, had nothing but one nearly useless meeting for the rest of the three terms. I am actually nearly too ashamed to describe this sum and educational value of this course in hindsight considering now its total value and content, though this seemed at the time only funny where things are beyond a joke ever. That is why it seemed funny. This consisited of a few very, very basic demonstration lessons in how to use an analogue studio: one hour a week over four or five weeks with no more teaching for the rest of the year. Then students were expected to submit recordings ("free compositions") made in the studio in their own time over the rest of the year.
With another specialist honours year course of the five annually taken, a third or fourth year option which did have full fortnightly tutorials timetabled for the whole course, the full amount of teaching and countable words from the tutor totalled less than ten minutes within one full academic year. These were the words of the then Dean of the Faculty. This is explained by the general practice of "teaching" here. The practice generally, and nearly always in sessions which were not the dictionary lectures, was to give a list of titles for students to prepare presentations upon, outside of lectures. This is not a joke. None of what you read here is a joke or even exaggerated, all now updated.
I describe here how these sessions proceeded, a series without variation. An analogous example for the English Lit. student’s tutorial would be a page of these titles dispensed in advance: "The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night; The Beautiful and the Damned; May Day and something else.", under the title F. Scott Fitzgerald, then to have students read in turn for the duration of the "teaching session" some basic analysis taken directly from a book or a dictionary description, often mumbled (always as I experienced on my course, nearly without an exception, at a standard short of a basic A Level pass or some distance short). The orator is often unclear of the context, or feigns this in these indefinable circumstances, though anyway can believe anything to be appropriate. There was next to nothing received by the student. One was always waiting. There was nearly no interaction either concerning any proper study at all. There was a sense of futility which grew and methods and attitudes which follow from this, confused attitudes and possibly "deviance" set in easily, as also it becomes clear to those with proper intentions that other students may be set aginst admitting such a thing, though they may be "in the same boat". Many though went down the channel where nothing may be of worth along with the staff. The profession of quite a number of the students was that deviance, not properly deviant at all in the circumstances, is the only appropriate reaction.
It was discussed between some students in my first year that if the teaching amounts to the first point reference dictionary nearly absolutely, then this practise should be the basis upon which the students’ work should be conceived. This held true at the height of what I experienced for four years, though it was also suggested in my first year that "shouldn't the student's input be less than the staffs'?", and so then, this latter concept was much more a prevalent model. I did not support this but it turned out to be true for all to variable extents anyway, as brainwashing in effect and entrenched student deviancy of the mould of Animal Farm in an anti-academic, anti-learning micro-culture prevented any expected application, pathetic in the light of sharing an expected study experience with the types whom I have described, and non-musicians who were also anti-musicians and anti-university though not this one, not that it could be described by this term. It seems that troublemakers arrived and "won" instantly, and to an unnapreciable length.
This is quite shocking if it is considered against the absolute, full teaching that I describe in full here.
Referring again to the mentioned course the tutor would respond to our readings, often grabbed parts of elementary books in the half hour before attending simply read out in for example, a searching or unsure and questioning fashion, with an apparent serious intent. There were positive affirmations emanating as the tutor seemed evidently to take some pride in remembering whatever was printed in the most general and simple books, this or, more usually, extreme indifference or patronisingness. Sometimes we found the unexpected occurrence of any one of these, where another might be expected, most humorous. Mostly there was no real reaction at all however. Thus developed the nature of what was usually a bizarre and quite delinquent game or dance which became most tutorials on this course for a year, the course’s entire sessions with staff comprising tutorials only. A still dance of the already dead.
This truth is so excepting for the intervention on special weeks of a countable number of words from the tutor’s mouth which was the total of the "teaching" from the tutor, remunerable service, on this full year’s course. A couple of times a term, and this is when this happy occurrence manifested itself, this may have amounted to ten, twenty or rarely perhaps nearly thirty words.
In first year I intended to reserve all judgements from the outset and distance myself as, unrelatedly, elder students informed me in a sort of medically therapeutic fashion that, "It does get much, much, much better", continuously. "It" though got much, much, much worse than the beginning of the first year and worse still after first year though this is scarcely imaginable. Though I genuinely attempted more than not to respond properly to a proper impetus of these teaching sessions, it was, connectedly and separately, impossible in that place to rise to any real degree level study very often. School teaching I had received, often seeming half thrown together, given also for new musicans without classical training, I had thought relatively basic at the time at a school I considered and still consider relatively mediocre (though I went to music school also) still exceeded this joke for young adults in every possible way and was of an unseeably superior mind level. One with opportunities. The comparison really even then can only exist in the very rare times each year at Edinburgh that there was the ocassional admittance or suggestion of the recognition of the value and position and identity of proper study in the arts, and the ocasional awareness springing up that there are those who recognise the arts, although this actual study then was not existant here. I believe I am quite safe in saying that I did not go to a very good school, though I believe and wish that this has the furthest possible reflection on me. I have no evaluative words to properly reflect on what I thought was to be a university.
I still don’t know hence what an arts tutorial might be.
AT EDINBURGH DON'T KEEP THINGS TO YOURSELF WHICH IT IS NOT NORMAL TO DO AS A REASONABLE ADULT.
Continued on page three.
[~...newone042c]
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