Four in 10 students say university not good value

Posted on 22/06/2015 by Rambling Rector

During my quarter of a century teaching at the University of Nottingham and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland I’ve seen the growth of ‘educationalists’. They purport to improve teaching standards by fostering an interest in the ‘discipline’ of ‘pedagogy’ (why do they insist on pronouncing this ‘pedagodjee’?)

Have they done so?

No.

They manufacture more and more hoops for those at the chalk-face to jump through.

They spin all sorts of guff about improving the student experience. They do this by giving the students questionnaires to fill in every week about this, that and the other. They are asked to grade individual staff on the basis of quality of handouts, or use of technology, or approachability, and much more.

They write garbage such as:

purposeful reflection (thinking, but at €100 an hour);
impactful research (difficult, since Medical Education Journals are pretty risible);
student centered e-portfolios (students do something online, the teachers ignore it);
the flipped classroom (getting students to read ahead and then asking questions during a ‘lecture’);
dynamic/personalized/bespoke Learning Environments (A place online to dump powerpoints);
student-led teaching, peer teaching (letting the students do the work while the staff do experiential research into different varieties of coffee);
interprofessional education (talking to each other).

As sociology was once defined as the study of those who don’t need to be studied by those who do, so medical education is the study of those who teach by those who can’t, won’t, and certainly shouldn’t.

And the sad thing is that the tail now wags the dog. Educationalists now call the shots. The result is that students are not now taught anything much. Students must reinvent the wheel for themselves. They are lectured about the ‘science’ of learning—in truth not a science at all, merely tendentious opinion.

University ‘teachers’ are appointed to lectureships on the basis of knowing a great deal about hardly anything. What matters for their career advancement is how many publications they produce, and in what journals. Chances are that to them the teaching and nurturing of students is a distraction. The ability to distil complex concepts as an introduction for the neophyte matters not one jot.

Students pay fees. At the College of Surgeons medical school (despite the name, for undergraduate medics not just surgeons), a medical student now pays over €50K a year. Just think what could happen if the students started to use this power. Oh yes, of course, silly me, what would happen is that they would not get their degrees, so they would not be able to earn enough money to pay off their student loans.

What is the solution?

Simples, as Aleksandr Orlov might say:

separate teaching and research and fund research separately;
abolish student fees.
let students pay teachers directly, on the spot: they would flock to the good ones who would be suitably rewarded.

The joys of ageing

Posted on 14/06/2015 by Rambling Rector

Eyes that see shall never grow old

I’ve been an OAP for a week. So far I’m enjoying it.

About fifteen years ago I attended a scientific meeting in London. We were put up in student accommodation at the London Hospital (Whitechapel). It was dreadful. After one night I thought I’m a forty(ish) year old Professor of Anatomy and I don’t need places like this in my life, so I hoofed off to one of the West End hotels for the next two nights.

Did I have notions of grandeur? Maybe. In any case it was a recognition that my life was probably half gone and that slumming it in grotty student accommodation was no longer desirable or necessary (I earned a lot more than I do now). I’ve never been that keen on hardship: my definition of slumming it is running out of ice cubes.

About five years ago I decided that I would never again be in a hurry. I start things earlier, I get things ready the night before, to avoid Where are the sermon notes? orders of service? …. I don’t clog up my diary unless I absolutely have to.

I like to arrive at airports at least two hours in advance, more for US. Speaking of which, I resolved not to have to get up early for flights—4 am reveille for 7 am flight, that sort of thing. But with dearly beloveds in Dublin, needs occasionally must. The return flights, if early, can be a real problem if one has partaken immoderately of Arthur’s nectar the evening before: “three’s enough, don’t you think? Oh, all right then.”

Eating habits have changed. I won’t begin an evening meal after 7.30 pm. I sleep terribly if I do. I have learnt over the years to avoid wheat (not gluten – wheat), for it makes me feel bloated and I sleep badly. I have learnt to cast lingering avaricious glances at Fish and Chip shops, rather than to enter, for similar reasons (sometimes I yield). Milk is snot-inducing poison.

I need a magnifying glass for reading books. I can’t hear people unless I can see their mouths. I tell them not to talk to my back, but they ignore me. Maybe they have the same problem.

As we age, we have to come to terms with changing mechanics and metabolism. I’m very fortunate that I don’t have more to worry about. I once said that I aimed to immature with age. And I enjoy not caring so much about any thing. I care only about people.

In my last parish I had an 85-year-old parishioner who, when asked how she was, said ‘well, Rector, I was able to pull up my knickers this morning, so I’m grand.’

There is nothing more to be said.

O taste and see

Posted on 11/06/2015 by Rambling Rector

Another avenue of pleasure closed off. The World Health Organisation tells us not to drink camel’s urine.

I was wondering why I was tired. I’m overweight. I was 64 (65 now). It’s very tiring to have people dumping their expectations on one—the lot of the Vicar. Then, listening to SWMBO, a type 2 diabetic (when I say listening, I mean being aware of faint buzzing sound somewhere to the left), I wondered if I was developing diabetes. That would account for tiredness. It would mean that I was drinking a lot. Now, I’m a copious tea drinker, though not in Bennite quantities, so how would I know? It would mean I was peeing a lot, and given the amount I drink, I don’t. And it would mean that my urine would taste sweet.

O taste and see. So I did. Nothing really. A bit salty perhaps, but I am a salt lover. I’ve never been a sugar lover. As a child I was known as the odd one who likes sandwiches not cakes. So no diabetes. Why bother with expensive tests when taste buds come free?

As a medical student I learnt the importance of always checking piss (in the Bible, don’t moan at me) and dung (also there, but less likely to provoke moaning). Here, boys and girls, is what to look for.

First, blood. This might be pinkness or redness or blackness from huge quantities of the stuff. Mind you, chances are you’ll already be at death’s door if it’s black—unless you’ve just returned from a night on Arthur’s best in Dublin. Blood in wee means something wrong with kidneys, bladder or connecting tubes. Blood in poo means something wrong with large intestine. Blood on poo means probably piles, which are kind-of blood blisters. Don’t sit on radiators or you’ll get thermopiles. Blood is a danger sign. Blood is good, but only confined to blood vessels. End of.

Now urine: colour, smell, pain. Note any change in what’s normal for you. I drink a lot, so mine is anything between clear and a delicate Piesporter. It doesn’t smell. Smelly dark urine often means infection, unless you’ve been perilously convivial the night before and have a head like a constipated turnip. If you’ve recently partaken of asparagus, your pee will smell pretty vile. It soon passes. If you’ve recently had a bum-burner, it might well sting a bit to pee. Don’t fret unnecessarily: use your common sense, should you have any left after last night.

Poo: colour, consistency, pain. Again, note any change from normal for you. Poo colour comes mainly from bile, which digests fats. If bile is unable to flow into the intestine, fats will not be digested so poo will be fatty, chalky coloured, smelly, and will float. In such cases, the bile is excreted from the body not in poo but in urine, so urine is dark. Pale stools and dark urine—always bad news: bile tubes are blocked. You’d be amazed how many doctors miss this, though not if they’ve been through my hands they shouldn’t.

Consistency: the function of the colon is to remove water from stools. So runny poo means that stuff is hurrying, or being hurried, through. There are several reasons why this might happen, often an infection by some of God’s non-human creatures. I once had a dreadful episode at Johannesburg airport that made the check-in lady enquire if I was well enough to board. I crossed my legs I can tell you. Read about it: Letter from Malawi. Parishioners who have had part of their colons removed have always responded well to being addressed as semi-colons (“oh no, it hurts to laugh”). I could go on, but maybe you’ve had enough for today. I shall deal with the ear next, I think. Quite fascinating.

From now on, look and sniff before flushing. Leave the tasting to others. Or machines.

Knowing one’s worth

Posted on 01/05/2015 by Rambling Rector

You would think this would do for the ABC

In today’s Church Times, The Archbishop of Canterbury seeks a Diary Manager, salary between 23K and 30K. My stipend is 23K, so when you add in the cost of housing I suppose the Diary Manager might be costing much the same as a parish priest. It’s good to know one’s worth in the eyes of the Pope of Canterbury.

The Diocese of London is thinking about having a seventh bishop. The Diocese of Leeds (formerly Bradford, Ripon and Wakefield) is appointing a sixth bishop. This diocese has four bishops. And if you’re regular C of E kind of guy or gal, you’ll know that each year the Dioceses ask for more and more of your money. You might think that there are questions to be asked about how the church spends its money. The place to ask them is … well, I can’t answer that. There isn’t one.

Deanery Synod might be the place, though a recent meeting I attended seemed concerned only about writing a mission statement. Deck chairs and titanics spring to mind. Nevertheless, Deanery Synod is the nearest to the decision makers that hoi polloi like you and me get, and it would be good to see meetings become a teeny bit relevant.

Some of my friends thought that the ad was asking for a ‘Dairy’ Manager. Quite a nice job, some said, looking after the Archbishop’s cattle, herding them, feeding and watering them, milking them. Well it might be in rolling Staffordshire perhaps, but in Lambeth I suspect it would be udderly tedious. Boom, boom.

We plod on. There were 12 people at today’s 1230 Mass. No gimmicks, just the work of the church in all its glory and tradition and continuity.

Awesome

Posted on 27/04/2015 by Rambling Rector

The Tetons, Wyoming, Truly awesome

An email today from a church administrator begins “I am hugely excited about the prospect …”

I think I remember being hugely excited when I was younger, probably about visiting Auntie Lily in Bradford. I was quite excited about being able to spend York Minster Evensong in the organ loft with Francis Jackson. That was over half a century ago. Have I been hugely excited since then? I rather doubt it.

I have looked forward to a rail journey to Prague, to playing Schnitger organs, to visits to the US, even to a Carlisle jaunt last week to relive my mis-spent youth on the Cathedral organ. I look forward to our autumn trip to Houston, even to watching a few films on the way.

Hugely excited? No. Is this because I am a grumpy old man? Is it simply a matter of semantics? Is the fault, if fault there be, in me?

A quick random trawl of a few church websites just now yields:

fantastic venue, fantastic celebration (same site). Fantastic means unreal – mind you, they use that too.
inspiring vision. Who does it inspire? It clearly inspires them, but for them to tell me that it does or will inspire me is presumptuous.
fabulous space. Really? Do they really mean the stuff of fables?
stunning public space. Rail journeys, hotels, views, décor, cosmetic … all these are now stunning. They knock you out.
vibrant church. Ye Gods.
amazing. So remarkable as to elicit disbelief? I don’t think that’s what they mean.
awesome. My granddaughter with her Texan accent uses this in a way that sounds entirely natural. It is charming. But used by aged hipster ‘worship leaders’ it is an embarrassment,

I am turned off by word-inflation in any context, but the church should know better than to indulge in it. It speaks of insecurity, desperation, panic and, worst of all, insincerity. People are not stupid – they see through it.

There are no words left to express real admiration, awe and excitement.

The world’s yer lobster

Posted on 23/04/2015 by Rambling Rector

Philosopher extraordinary

Pensions soon. The UK state pension is pretty measly. I know I worked in the Republic of Ireland for a bit, but some years back I bought extra, so I get the full state pension without any bells or whistles. £113 a week wouldn’t keep much going if that was all. How do people manage on it?

Then there’s the pension from 14 years in UK universities. That’s a bit better. On top of that comes a pension from 15 years at the College of Surgeons in Dublin. Euro – so that’s affected by exchange rates, Euroland politics, and different tax regimes. What a joy. Anyhoo, all that might add up to something reasonable until western capitalism collapses. Being so cheerful keeps me going.

At some time in the future I start to get a miniscule pension from three years in the Church of Ireland (euro again, maybe enough for the occasional bottle of gin), and some sort of Irish State Pension. Euro again. but worth having, for it’s more generous than the UK state pension. Finally, if I don’t die first, there’s a tiny pension from the C of E. Mind you, I’ve no intention of giving up here for a while yet. We like Burton and this incumbency so far is congenial. There’s a danger that some of my pronouncements may fall foul of church thought police, but I’m not too bothered.

I’ve not been a good husband of my financial resources. I find it so much easier to spend than to earn. It’s a disease I have. I can always sell my body, or teach. I could write a real humdinger of novel about Protestant shenanigans in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom mountains, fictional of course. So the world’s my lobster as Brian Potter might have said.

First we need somewhere to live. But where?

A son, daughter and son-in-law in Dublin, pensions in euro – makes sense, doesn’t it? But Dublin is expensive. We’ve tried Ireland twice. Didn’t someone say something profound about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result next time … ?

A son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter in Texas. A big part of me would be off to the US like a shot, and not only for family. I love the feeling of unconstrained-ness, wide spaces, open-ness, expansiveness (Hebrew salvation), opportunities for everyone no matter what age. It’s a pity that a car is a total must-have, but I could live with that. Oh, think of the places to visit!

The cost of health insurance is a bit of a downer though, especially with SWMBO having type 2 diabetes (as yet I am, though deaf, blind and fat, with a dodgy back the result of a weightlifting incident some years ago, mercifully free of disease), so the NHS is something of a twitch upon the thread.

The only place where I feel I know every inch of land is the area bounded by Tebay, Mallerstang, Pennines, Scottish border and river Caldew. That would be a possibility except that property prices are quite high (the M6 corridor). We like Norfolk, but so does everyone else. We’d like to be by the sea, but so would everyone else. Round here is good and we like it.

What I’d really like is a cottage right next to a busy mainline railway. Oxenholme say, or Shallowford near Stafford to choose two places at random. Sitting in the garden surrounded by dogs I could say ‘there goes the 0830 from Euston; a bit late today’ or whatever.

Wherever it is, it needs to be handy for trains to Birmingham or Manchester airports. Answers on a postcard please, no prizes.

A right judgement in all things

Posted on 22/04/2015 by Rambling Rector

A General Election approaches. Some people expect the Vicar to make deep and meaningful recommendations and warnings about who to vote for, or not to vote for. The trouble is, I can’t.

I can’t recommend voting for any one person or any one party in particular. This is not because I’m unwilling to say what I think—I’m not. It’s not because the first-past-the-post system makes it pretty pointless voting in constituencies with large majorities, though that is the case.

It’s because the big 3 are all pretty woeful. Labour big nobs are Islington windbags with attitude, obsessed with political correctness. Tories are all Cotswolds and Chelsea tractors, and Liberals simply wishy-washy. I have some sympathy with English people feeling at a disadvantage compared to the Welsh and the Scottish, but the solutions on offer for that are, to say the least, unappealing.

I look for a bit of decency and common sense. I’d like to think there was some old-Labour somewhere. I’d like to see someone confront corruption. I’d like to see an end to the culture of giving jobs to school chums, friends and relations (the Church of England is pretty good at that too). I’d love to see an end to rampant corporate managerialism that stifles us all, especially schools and hospitals, preventing teachers, doctors and nurses from doing what they thought they would be doing when they joined those professions. I’d love to see a welfare system that helps the hard-pressed without making silly hoops for them to jump through, and that no longer pays a few to be irresponsible.

You might be tempted to vote for a party you don’t really agree with in order to give the same-old-same-old a bloody nose. You might be tempted to spoil your ballot paper. You might be tempted to vote for her or him because they have a nice smile, or they sent you a Christmas card, or did some small service that is no more than their duty, and for which they are paid.

All I can suggest is that you vote for those you think will best serve the common good. This might not be in your self-interest, but it might just lead to a healthier society and a healthier world community. Of course, with the best will in the world, you might make a decision that turns out to have been ill-judged. But nobody chooses wisely all the time.

Vote for the good of all, on balance. Not the good of the bankers, of the landowners, of those with their snouts already in the trough, or for this group or that, but think about sons and daughters trying to get a job, find a home, start a family and make a contribution to society.

Vote for the common good.

Fireworks and Og don’t mix

Posted on 19/04/2015 by Rambling Rector

Fireworks at the Town Hall last night—the Vicarage is a stone’s throw away. The dog really does not like the bangs, squeaks and whooshes. I was in bed with a virus, so to speak, and he tried to get into my skin, trembling and panting in terror.

Last night was a Sikh festival, but it’s much the same at New Year, Christmas, Eid, Divali, and for about a week over Halloween/Guy Fawkes.

The poor creature is a rescue dog. Since he came to us about three years ago, he’s better than he was, but he’s still terrified of brushes, men in hoodies, the sounds of a football match, and traffic, especially lorries. And he will not come through a doorway if you are standing by it.

We’ve all got our fears. Some of them are rational, some not. Some of the irrational ones hark back to our evolution: we recoil from some creatures because inherited knowledge deep inside recognizes that they might be, or once have been, harmful. I dislike spiders and always call for SWMBO to deal with them. Obviously I am more sensitive to inherited wisdom than she is.

The things that terrify Og the Dog are more likely to be learnt than inherited. It does not speak well of the humans that he met during his first two years.

Back to fireworks. My children will tell you with glee of their foolish and incompetent father who, when they were in single figures and we lived in Nottingham, dropped a match into the box of fireworks. The results were dangerously spectacular.

Rambling Rector Retired

Category Archives: A great future behind me