It’s getting toward the end of the academic year, and our students would like to get jobs of some kind (I presume) so we ran a ‘careers event’ this evening featuring students old and new. Annalisa, on the left, graduated from the degree a decade ago now: Irene, on the right, last year. Kenji behind seems excited about something. Good luck to them all in their various futures.
Teaching has restarted after the Easter break so I guess I should put in the occasional appearance on campus. It’s also that time of year when the assignment kicks in on the video production course, and some students develop an urge to point cameras at me and others for educational ends. Shen (left, from China) and Gatya (Indonesia) here anticipate that I will be able to talk about something interesting over the next ten minutes or so.
A rare appearance on the blog for my office: the sharp-eyed may note the newspaper cutting on the wall celebrating Brighton’s League Cup victory over Manchester City in 2009. And why not.
Congratulations to all my students who graduated from the class of 2015 at today’s ceremony — and indeed to all students everywhere, who work bloody hard, you know.
The campus suddenly gets a hundred times busier. But this is what I’m here to do. So ignoring the fact that it was raining today, which it seems to do on this arrival day every year, it was great to meet 30 or so of the people with whom I am going to share the next 11 months or so.
Amazingly we managed to get money off the university this year to have an end-of-year dinner. Why this particular stone started shedding blood for the first time in my 10 years there, I have no idea. Dan (left, student) and Gary (right, colleague) wait to place our order in the highly distinctive surroundings of the old vault — check out those safety deposit boxes — in the former bank building which now houses Jamie’s Italian in Manchester (its second appearance on the blog, after this one 15 months ago).
The Raspberry Pi is a small computer which one can buy for £25 and is targeted at kids who can use it to learn programming. That’s it visible bottom right of centre, with all the wires connecting it up to the keyboard and monitor so you can see what you are doing on it — Mandy and Sarah Jane here were using it to compose a version of ‘Jingle Bells’ as it happens. It’s nice to get a shot of people being this engaged in a class…
Seeing as I seemed to spend most of the day teaching in one way or another it seems appropriate to use a picture of a class to encapsulate the day.
The three students in the foreground are Chinese and Korean, the book they are looking at is in Arabic. I could give away my pedagogical secrets and tell you why, but then I’d have to kill you. (Or you could just enroll on my degree, of course.)
Couldn’t take lots of photos at this happy event because I had an official role to play: it would not have done to have been snapping away from up on the stage while reading out the names of the many graduates celebrating their achievements this evening. (Reading the names out is a harder job than it looks, I can assure you.) This was the best shot to encapsulate the most important thing about the day however – it makes people happy.
I would say, somebody please tell our government that higher education remains a public good, but we have done so, and they don’t care. Very soon Fei, and I, will sod off to work and study in a country which still values the notion of higher education as something which benefits everyone, not just the student. And we will take all the expertise and economic gains that it represents with us. Their loss. I hope it never happens, but we teeter on the edge here in the UK system, right now.
I took last Friday off (see below) because I was teaching all day today. At the same time I didn’t leave the house. This is no contradiction; it is a sign that I do good chunks of my teaching online. The classroom of the 21st century can be sat on the lap, my connection represented by the little green eye of the web cam.
Would I want to teach this way all the time? No, but at least two people today said how glad they were that I did, because it opened up an otherwise unavailable education to them. And that, alone, gives it value.
Being 42 