The Cross On Which I Have Chosen to Die

As semester gets going, life shouldn’t get harder. You have more work to do, sure, but for all involved familiarity with the daily grind of lectures and workshops should tend towards allowing time to focus on the academics. For some reason, this year, it just isn’t working out like that.

History: It’s just one fucking thing after another.

‘The History Boys’ by Alan Bennett

First, there was the course choices fiasco. This isn’t even that unusual, we’ve had timetable clashes in the past, but this time the severe lack of communication and any sort of joined up thinking led to coming into university on the first Monday and having no idea which lectures I should be going to or what was meant to be going on. In choosing to give up on the one oversubscribed course which actually looked interesting, I made a conscious decision not to get involved in the inevitable politics arising from the student will and the administrative won’t. I had no desire to get mixed up in it all again, not after the constitutions crisis. I thought I had avoided this year’s controversy.

Relatedly, the incredibly annoying policy of not starting courses when they are supposed to according to the timetable is very frustrating when you’re supposed to be trying several courses to find them to drop. This has finally settled out, though seven lecture hours a week for one course is too much. Absolutely too much.

Then there was the dance of the emails going on with my MPhys project. I did not think it so difficult to set a time for a meeting between three people, even if one of them is on the other side of the Atlantic. How much effort can possibly be needed? A lot, apparently. We still have not managed to have this meeting, despite it now having had two scheduled dates. Synchronizing across timezones is very difficult, but evidently not as difficult as keeping track of an email thread. I hope this is going to be worth it, the hype train already at full steam ahead.

At the beginning of the week, I thought this was it. There was no more which could go wrong. Oh how wrong I was.

If you’re going to do this damn silly thing, don’t do it in this damn silly way.

“Yes, Minister”, Series 1, Episode 5, “The Writing on the Wall” by Sir Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn

The basic purpose of being at university is to learn in great detail a specific subject, often from leaders in the field. The problem with this is that just because you’re a good researcher, or a thinker, or even a leader, it does not at all follow that you’re a capable lecturer, nor does it follow that you’re a good person.

There are fantastic lecturers. They are the ones whose lectures have stuck with me as the gold standard: how all lectures should be run. Donal O’Connell and Kristel Torokoff to name the ones who saved the fourth-year-from-pedagogical-hell I experienced last year. A basic feature of these is that the person doing the teaching has at least worked out how to use all of the resources available, and follows the policies in place with regards accessibility. Or, to put it more bluntly, showed any iota of care for the adults who choose to sit and listen to them for hours a week. The fact that the above named also go way above and beyond to make the learning environment engaging, or at least bearable, is what makes them the best in the business; it’s not needed for the day-to-day.

Learning how to operate the lights, blackboards, and other technology in a lecture theatre should be the bare minimum requirement for being allowed to teach in a modern university. We put up with some incapability in these areas, for some reason which at this point I frankly cannot fathom.

You are brilliant, smart, talented beyond measure, fiercely intelligent and full of passion, enthusiasm and joy for learning.

‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?

Being a student is a one of a kind state of being. You are at your best right here and now, it’s a stimulating and exciting time, but also a time of stress, worry, doubt. This makes it particularly important to be kind to yourself, and help each other to be kind.

Dr. Kristel Torokoff in an email to the Methods of Mathematical Physics class on 11th November 2017

At the beginning of the week, I decided to finally do something about the disregard for the microphones policy, or rather I fell into being the campaigner for it. It seems like a frivolous thing to get worked up about now, but it is a basic standard of respect for your audience. When asked to do use a microphone due to a genuine issue I was having with hearing, I was responded to with contempt. I don’t deal well in these situations of conflict. I think I did succeed in that I did not entirely lose my temper. I did, however, declare privately that this was the final straw, and it was now the cross on which I was prepared to die.

Previously I have waxed lyrical about the need to see the bigger picture and not get worked up over storms in teacups. This week has been the ultimate failure of that for me. I have talked about very little else, and still approached the complaints procedure with the usual pessimism which accompanies righteous indignation. At the end of the day, nobody really stands to gain, except for my sense of victory.

As it happens, change has happened, and I have a lot more respect for the administration within the School than I did.

Not nearly enough change has happened, mind. I’m almost certain now that this was the archetypal result of incompetence being the culprit over malice, since the lecturer involved doesn’t seem the most collected person. I don’t think it’s over though. It definitely shouldn’t be, not given the context of why the policy exists in the first place, and quite how my recollection of how Tuesday went down paints the situation.

As I march into the end of being able to describe myself as being in my early 20s, my ability to put up with perceived injustice is disappearing. To care is to feel; to fight is to stand up for your right to feel. My nightmares almost always feature somehow not being able to communicate the oncoming storm; without agency, without humanity. I never want to be forced into speechlessness in my real life again for the sake of a microphone needed for someone else to be heard.

In other news, ‘An Absolutely Remarkable Thing’, the new book by Hank Green, is really good. You should read it.