Tag Archives: students

Dec 12 2023
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Daily Post, Friend, Portrait

Last class for quite some time

Monday 11th December 2023, 3.45pm (day 4,491)

Last ETC class, 11/12/23

The last class of the semester, and as I’m on sabbatical for several months next year, the last one for me until late September 2024. And that’s just fine by me. I do — generally — like teaching but it is tiring, time-consuming work and if I want to do some proper thinking I can do with taking a break from it. The last class of the semester also gives rise to the annual ceremony of ‘having pictures taken with one’s professor’ — I make people upset if a 20-minute window isn’t offered up at the end.

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Sep 20 2023
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Daily Post, Interior

Welcome Week, in the rain

Tuesday 19th September 2023, 11.45am (day 4,408)

Marquee in rain, 19/9/23

It’s the first week of the semester, so the following things traditionally appear: lots more people (students); a collection of marquees with various AV equipment and heaters; and rain. It always seems to rain in Welcome week, year in, year out.

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Mar 26 2023
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Independent thought

Friday 24th March 2023, 12.05pm (day 4,229)

DMIL students, 24/3/23

I think I might finally have provoked the students into some independent thinking. They were talking about something, anyway.

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Dec 14 2022
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The Last Class: photography ceremony

Tuesday 13th December 2022, 10.45am (day 4,128)

ETC last class, 13/12/22

It’s the last class of the semester, and the done thing among students now is “get a photo of themselves with the lecturer” at this point. I acknowledge this but it did require leaving at least 20 minutes at the end of the session so the ceremony could take place: what you see here is the queue after at least half of them had already had their time. I was feeling like a cardboard cut-out of myself by this point, although not an unhappy one. Here I said, ‘right, I’m taking a photo of all you lot while you wait to take a photo of me’… and this is the result.

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Oct 19 2022
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The students do some work

Tuesday 18th October 2022, 10.15am (day 4,072)

ETC class, 18/10/22

Well, they can do some work now and again. It’s what they’re here for, after all. This morning, they discuss the book as an information technology — which it definitely is, and if you’re not sure why, then come to my next class. And yes, they are all Chinese and female, which is also the way it is in higher education at this time.

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Jun 25 2022
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Prof Brown tells us how it is (or was)

Thursday 23rd June 2022, 12.35pm (day 3,955)

Prof Brown and fans, 23/6/22

During this week at the London Rare Books School I have felt privileged to be taught by Professor Michelle Brown, second from the left here. What an awesome fund of knowledge she has, seemingly knowing absolutely everything that happened to everyone before about 1500 AD. Like being taught physics by Richard Fenynman, and the sort of experience that you just ain’t gonna get through Zoom, sorry.

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Apr 06 2022
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Spring graduation (2022 only)

Tuesday 5th April 2022, 3.10pm (day 3,876)

We don’t normally do spring graduations. These are replacements for the ceremonies that were going to take place in December and then were cancelled at two day’s notice because everyone in ‘Authority’ had another outbreak of paranoia that — let’s look back and be honest about this — turned out to have very little basis in sensible judgments of risk. Anyway, I’m glad they finally made it. It offers a, hopefully singular, opportunity to picture the daffodil/graduation conjunction. And yes, the litter is there but let’s try to work it into the composition somehow.

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Dec 15 2021
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Poster day

Tuesday 14th December 2021, 10.10am (day 3,764)

The last taught class of the first semester, and of 2021. The students show off the ideas they’ve been working on in groups over the last few weeks — including, here, 3-D printing being used to create replicas of famous artworks that people can then touch and interact with, which seems a reasonable idea to me. It was an engaging, interesting class, and one that if I had listened to my paranoid employer, I should have hoiked online at 12 hours’ notice. But I didn’t listen, and the life of everyone involved was all the better for it.

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Oct 02 2021
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The new students get thinking

Friday 1st October 2021, 12.10pm (day 3,690)

Masked students, 1/10/21

I regret the fact that they all still feel the need to wear a mask. I regret that so many of them have not yet been able to arrive, thanks largely to airlines ripping them off and governments (worldwide) still using Covid as an excuse to be mean to foreigners. But I’m still glad they’re here. This is only the second day in more than 18 months — the first being 4th December 2020 — in which I’ve been able to hold a face-to-face class. There seemed to be some work going on at this point.

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Sep 22 2021
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Free beer and haircut

Tuesday 21st September 2021, 11.45am (day 3,680)

Free beer and haircut, 21/9/21

In some years the return of the students to campus is not always exactly a welcome event — it marks the end of summer, it presages a lot of work for the weeks ahead, etc. But in 2021 it would be impossible not to celebrate it. And anyone who thinks that some kind of future lockdown is an inevitability, please leave the room now, I will have nothing to do with that viewpoint. The only way I will be incarcerated in the future is by being arrested.

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