Always Winter, Never Christmas

 I'm way too tired to do any blogging this week. Too tired to have any opinions, despite quite a lot going on in the world, from Trump to Cummings to England finally beating Ireland at soccer for the first time since I was 10 (1985). Well done you! 

My students and colleagues are all exhausted - the sheer extra effort involved in writing then recording and editing lectures, then doing face-to-face classes while simultaneously trying to get the online crowd involved, and the sheer time and effort required to get anything done via live chat (most students won't talk online) is very sapping. Many of the students are struggling to engage – either they're coming down with the coronavirus themselves, caring for others, or just plain stressed out by the situation: large numbers aren't reading the primary texts, attending classes, watching the recorded lectures nor joining the online classes. It really feels like we're making even more effort than usual with less and less purpose. For the first time ever we haven't recruited a full slate of module and course representatives, such is the mood amongst the students. I've always liked Mr Tumnus's line in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe about life under the Witch: 'It's always winter, and never Christmas'. If Britain's looking for a new motto, that seems to sum things up nicely. 

I'm spending the weekend marking - I don't even know which half of Universities Minister Donelan's sentence in her confused and dishonest letter to VCs to adhere to: should I pass everyone to ensure 'good outcomes' or mark rigorously to ensure that 'standards are protected' (the accompanying letter to students helpfully gives a direct link to the universities' complaints procedure, but somehow forgot to include contact details for the Minister or indeed any way to give the government any feedback on its own performance). If our students do well we're threatened with intervention on the grounds of grade inflation; if they don't achieve high grades we're punished for failing them. Ironically, it's unfashionable ex-polys like mine that mark most harshly, afraid of playing into the hands of the Daily Mail: it was a Russell Group university that changed all of a friend's entirely justified grading on the grounds - as was explained to her by the head of department - that 'XXXXX University students get 2.1s and 1sts'. You can't upset the customers. The latest wheeze is to judge universities by their students' salaries after graduation: so if you educate a local population of poor people who want to serve their community in low-paid but important jobs like nursing social care or teaching, you're a Bad University. If on the other hand you have the kind of Business School that churns out asset-strippers and hedge-funders, or have a conveyor belt from the lab to British Aerospace's weapons design unit, you're a Good University. 

Some of the international students have admitted defeat and gone home, including a group of the final Erasmus cohort. It's always been an enormous pleasure to have them in class, and it's desperate to think that their last experience of Britain before it enters political self-isolation is of a miserable, sick country with no idea what it's doing or what it's for. If Britain thinks it will have friends in the next generation of Europeans, it's deluded. 

I've always liked teaching face-to-face and still do, but the absurdity of trying to make myself and the students intelligible while wearing masks for lecturing really struck me this week. Mind you, it could be worse: the posh universities are fencing their students in and deploying riot police squads. Not a great look for next year's brochures. By contrast I switched on the TV the other day to see my own VC looming out of the screen on BBC news, making a string of salient and coherent points. Things have got to be bad when we find common ground. (Don't worry, it'll all be over by Christmas). 

Ah, enough of this. It's been a tough week. As I've only managed to read half a book other than those for teaching (this week: Riders, Anne of Green Gables, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Barthes's The Pleasures of Text and Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist. The half-book I read is Ian McDonald's early Out On Blue Six, a slightly manic but enormously enjoyable early work bought because I liked his Brasyl and The Dervish House very much. 

Oh, and I have new neighbours. Noisy Adult Baby neighbour has been replaced by a lovely family with an actual baby. The walls are very thin, so I wake every three hours when it needs feeding. Before long I'm going to develop some kind of Pavlovian response to its crying. Anyway, it's been a while since I posted any photos so here are some cheery ones from my annual Welsh conference at Gregynog in 2016. I will never tire of taking pictures of sheep.