For a course that is meant to be unbearably intensive, it starts pretty lightly, for the first couple of months we’ve got a full day and half without any lectures. I’m wondering if I’m misinterpreting “intensive”. In my previous life, if someone said something was going to be intensive, you didn’t know if you were going to get home that night. At St Martha’s, it would appear to mean, after 3am maybe you should think about whether you really ought to open that other bottle of vodka.
In fact, the first few days have been anything but intensive, they’ve been all induction. The only thing approaching a lecture was a couple of hours on how course work should be presented. This was very dry but pretty useful, and possibly more useful to me than anyone else. I haven’t written an academic dissertation for 20 years, and things have changed a bit in that time.
Given the amount of time since I last was in the college setting, it was most helpful in facilitating me developing strategies for completion of the course. For example how do you get through a dry lecture when you’re surrounded by 130 twenty-one year old women, how on earth do you keep focussed? The answer is remarkably simple – sit at the front of class. This is a bit of a turn of events, when I were young, we all used to fight to sit at the back. Sitting at the front, the only person you really focus on are the lecturers, and although, from the limited experience I’ve had of them so far, they appear to be excellent, just looking at them doesn’t present you with the same concentration challenges that looking at the class does.
So although the timetable does appear to be a little light on first sight, it is at least there. My first 2 lectures are RE and Music. When I take this home and present it to the mother of my children (MOMyC), she openly laughs. Well, maybe it wasn’t a laugh, maybe it was something more of a snigger, whatever, it was an impossible to suppress expression of her impression of my ability to teach music, ridiculous to the point of comedy.
For time immemorial, writers have played on the fragile nature of the male ego, especially in relation to parts of the anatomy. However, as a trainee teacher, I can tell you that this applies equally to the ability to teach different subjects, including music (and, by the way, I contest the validity of her reaction). The consequences of this are difficult to fathom, thought I would consider the following sequence of events would be highly canalised (yes, I’ve read my “Bluff your way in Developmental Psychology”)
1. Vindictive and baseless (my interpretation) comment on musical ability – its never actually been proven that I’m tone deaf, although my dancing to Reggae does give some indication of my innate rhythmic appreciation
2. Subsequent depression and social withdrawal
3. Resort to use of alcohol, and, eventually, other consciousness changing substances, as coping strategies
4. Reliance develops on such substances
5. Moving outside of mainstream society due to this dependency, including the breakdown of relationships, unemployment, and homelessness
6. Finally, early death. Slow, painful and alone
The moral is, be careful before you criticise what a man can do with his recorder.
