An article in The Guardian has just caught my eye, reporting on a study that shows that the wealthiest students dominate the arts and humanities, with poorer students opting for science or vocational degrees. The figures on which the report is based, provided by the Sutton Trust, are not quite as extreme as the paper's feature writer would like to make out:

31% of those who graduated in 2008 with degrees in history or philosophy were the children of senior managers – the socio-economic group with the highest income. Across all English university courses, an average of 27% of graduates were from this group.

And:

Language graduates were also disproportionately from the wealthiest homes, with 30% from the highest income group. In comparison, non-arts and humanities courses – with the exception of medicine and dentistry – had far fewer students from the highest-income group. Just 17% for education, 22% for computer sciences and 23% for business studies were from the wealthiest homes.

That 4% difference between those children of senior managers who graduated in history, and those offspring of top professionals who graduated in other subjects, is hardly a statistical gulf. Nevertheless, it does chime with my own experience - both as a student and as a university teacher - that the arts (I'm talking English specifically, of course) attract a certain type of student.

In my own personal experience, coming from a middle class home with two parents who had already been to university, I was always encouraged to study what I enjoyed, which might or might not be most valuable as an ultimate career option. As I moved to A-levels, my college's timetable allowed me to study either physics or history; in the end, I opted for history, which was essential to my application to read English at a top university. It is not hard to imagine that, coming from a different background, I would have been pushed towards the subject that might see me enter university with a vocational career in mind, rather than towards arts A-levels which, at the time, would have had an uncertain exit point from university even if they were pleasurable to do. With different parents, I could have been another victim of the UK's unusual funnelling in further and higher education, which sees UK students forced to specialise in their subjects far earlier than their continental and transatlantic counterparts. It is easy to imagine A-level students who love English but who happen to be good at a science subject being pushed by their parents into studying the latter, when if they were allowed to study a broader spectrum of subjects for a longer period, the students themselves rather than parental background would determine which subjects they enjoy, which should be a factor in which subject to choose at university.

In the present day reality, though, as a teacher I do perceive that students who start English degrees tend to come from a narrow social class mix. At the top-ten university at which I teach (which shall of course remain nameless), across the arts and humanities 48% of students came from independent schools, whereas only 33% of students in the sciences came from that educational background. In English, an astonishing 65% of students came from independent schools. Our tutorials echo with the voices of privilege. Ben Knights, director of the English subject centre, has worried that "There could be a progressive gentrification of arts and humanities." I agree - although my fears here are tempered by my experiences teaching for the Open University, which attracts a much more diverse mix of students.

But regardless of the facts here, we do run the risk of creating a fallacy if we draw an association between the social class of students and the types of degree they do. The Guardian article (and many of the commentators below it) seem to be making the pejorative assumption that if wealthy students (or students of wealthy parents) are doing arts degrees then the degrees themselves must be self-indulgent and ultimately worthless. This is entirely false.

For a start, the arts sector is a large scale employer in the UK. According to Prospects, the UK's official careers website, 6.2% of graduates went into careers as arts, culture and media professionals; marketing, sales and advertising (another common destination for arts' graduates) comprised another 4%. According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the creative arts sector employs 1.8 million people in the UK. Even assuming that not all jobs in this sector will require a traditional arts degree, it is clearly wrong to assume that the arts and humanities are soft and self-indulgent subjects which have no socio-economic benefit.

As for employment, although the present recession sees uncertain prospects for all graduates, 7.9% of Arts' graduates were unemployed six months after graduating, whereas 8.5% of science graduates were unemployed after the same period. Now, in the longer term it may be true that science graduates can expect to earn more than their arts counterparts, but again it is a myth that arts graduates are doing economically unviable subjects.

Supported by figures like these, it is vital that the economic case for the arts is made with conviction and clarity. In the past, a story about the class bias in degrees might simply be an ideological footnote to be picked up by a left-wing paper like The Guardian. But in the present economic climate, the stakes are much higher. Whitehall officials are considering slashing the Higher Education teaching budget by 75%. Having been told to protect "strategically important" subjects such as science and technology and engineering, budgets for subjects in the arts and humanities look likely to be hardest hit. Stories about the wealthy class of students these subjects attract will make them seem a tempting double-target, not only seen as strategically unimportant but also as an opportunity to bash the sons and daughters of all those wealthy but worthless bankers and lawyers, the liberal elites who got us into the recession in the first place.

Such tabloid prose is of course absurdly simplistic. But then so too are governments (I include New Labour here too) which bean counts the impact factors of university research, and the perceived direct correlation between the number of engineers and accountants in an economy, and gross domestic product which has become the sole measure of the success of our national culture.

Labels: careers, English Literature, University Life

The Guardian's Comment is Free section has recently seen a spirited debate between science and arts students about whether the respective contact hours they receive at university are a fair reflection of the tuition fees they pay. The contact hour is an imperfect but useful focus for a discussion about value for money in higher education. As a prelude to Lord Browne's university funding review, which is likely to see both tuition fees increase and accompanying requirements for universities to be more transparent about the quality of teaching they deliver, the raw contact hour provides the best handle by which current students can grasp the relation between fees, and the education for which they pay.

As an English graduate under the £1000 per year tuition fee model, and now as someone who tutors part time in English, I have long weighed into the debate, blogging grumpily about my belief that the current levels of teaching are inadequate and that the universities have ample capacity to deliver more teaching with their tuition fee money. However, to my shame as an academic research, I realised that my prejudices were not informed by detailed evidence. I therefore developed a "contact hours" calculator, which would help to work out precisely how much a contact hour costs a student in different subjects.

This contact hours calculator is now publically available on The Pequod. It is an Excel spreadsheet with a user-friendly front-end (please enable macros to run it): Download the Tuition Fee and Contact Hours Calculator.

Accompanying the calculator, I wrote a long essay explaining the limitations with the notion of the "contact hour," whilst also running with it to test the relationship between tuition fees and contact hours. The headline results were surprising. Firstly, many contributors to the debate (including myself) have failed to account for the proportion of the "tuition" fee that universities spend on what the Higher Education Statistics Agency labels "Academic Support" (the likes of careers services, counselling and administration) and "Facilities" (accommodation blocks, sports halls, libraries) rather than teaching contact. This infrastructure spend - currently only listed in the Complete University Guide league table - often accounts for half of the tuition fee total.

Once the proportion of the tuition fee that gets spent on infrastructure is deducted, a student in chemistry at a top UK university might be paying as little as £3.00 per student, per contact hour, seemingly outstanding value for money. A student in English at another top university might give double this, £6.00 per student, per contact hour. A lecture delivered to 150 science students contributes £500 to the university. A small group seminar delivered to 20 English students contributes £130.

It is important to note that this is the figure for one hour of face-to-face contact, per student. It does not include the time a lecturer or tutor must spend in preparing teaching materials or marking work. Conversely, a lecture delivered to 200 students will accumulate a greater proportion of the tuition fees than a small group tutorial. Nevertheless, looked at from any perspective, objectively both the English student and chemistry student seem to be getting a good return on their tuition fees, even if from a comparative point of view the chemistry student has more contact time.

The unanswered question is about the quality of different types of teaching environment. Does an interactive, small group tutorial develop an English student's academic, interpersonal and study skills twice as much as a science student's large group lecture?

The calculator also raises issues to do with the accessibility of data. The "tuition" fee is a misnomer, as a significant proportion goes on infrastructure rather than direct teaching. The English student might naturally expect some of their money to be diverted to a well-stocked university library, which also provides adequate facilities for private study. But the HESA "Facilities" and "Academic Services" components lump together spending on academic facilities with extra-curricular ones, such as sports, whilst it does not discriminate between the amount an arts student contributes to the resources that might most benefit them (such as a well-stocked library and private study facilities) and the amount a science student contributes to their relevant resources (such as laboratory equipment).

This blog post represents the public launch of the tuition fee calculator. You are invited to read the essay in full, which explores its implications in more detail, whilst prospective students and interested commentators should find the tuition fee calculator useful as a way of better understanding how tuition fees are currently spent.

Labels: contact hours, tuition fees, University Life

According to Elif Batuman's LRB review, Mark McGurl's book about the influence of creative writing schools on literary fiction, The Program Era, makes an interesting proposition. This is that as in technology or sport, "systematic investments of capital over time have produced a continual elevation of performance" in the sphere of writing. With regards to style alone, Batuman agrees:

If you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. 

Such improvements will not, of course, be universal across all writers; but neither should they be limited to those who have directly been taught creative writing. Any amateur tennis player must perceive that because Roger Federer has overturned the assumption that the preceding generation of Sampras and Agassi would never be bettered, so too it ought in principle to be possible for the most modest player to supersede their own expectations; couple such inspiration with practical developments in sport science, and you have a potent formula for improving sportsmen across the board. Similarly, in creative writing, when the existence of writing schools is linked with the persistent if outdated New Critical doctrine that aesthetics can be understood and judged in absolute and even scientific terms, a powerful notion must take root in the mind of any aspiring novelist. That it is possible to to learn the techniques that make for well-written literature, coupled with the living examples of those successful graduates of such schools (McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Naomi Alderman, to name some of the graduates of the University of East Anglia alone), puts paid to the myth that creativity is somehow god-given but untutored, a kind of demonic possession. So McGurk's central thesis that the mere existence of academies for writing, the professionalisation of the form, should see attendant improvements in the state of the art generally is a fairly reasonable one.

Certainly, as I am reading a lot of contemporary literature at the moment in preparation for a course that I am about to teach on post-war fiction, I think it is hard to find examples of bad writing, which goes hand in hand with many of the influences of the achieved practice of creative writing. Pat Barker's Regeneration offers my most recent example. Early in the novel, there is a conversation between the psychologist, Rivers, and Robert Graves, who has tried to manipulate his friend Siegfried Sassoon into admission into Rivers' psychiatric hospital. Graves at first tells Rivers that the reason Sassoon had let himself be admitted was that:

"He couldn't go on denying he was ill."
Rivers didn't reply. The silence deepened, like a fall of snow accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed.
"No, it wasn't like that." Graves's knobbly, broken-nosed boxer's face twitched. "I lied to him."

The snow metaphor separating Graves's initial statement from his true admission is quite admirable. It works literally to fill the time and silence between the two pieces of direct speech, padding out the dialogue in a dramatic fashion, but also as a figure of time and silence in the abstract. Yet there is something not quite right about it. No - "right" is the wrong word to use, but it is precisely the problem: the metaphor is too right, too polished and perfect. The steady, successful poetry of the image contrasts with the next description, of Graves's "knobby, broken-nosed boxer's face." The idea of Graves, a war hero, as a mere broken-nosed boxer rather than one scarred by his actual experiences on the front, is slightly comic but also therefore poignantly incongruous. In this short passage I see two elements side by side. In the first, one can almost read the sign on the door of the creative writing workshop: "Day One: Metaphor." In the other, the more intuitive, naturalistic writer with the untutored eye for a telling detail that adds a nuanced and ambiguous definition to her character.

Perhaps I am being unfair here. Style is a subtle, tricky spirit and, of course, no one can finally identity which elements of it have been bottled and then taught, and which are the outcome of a more intuitive process. What one can say, though, is that across the board of much contemporary literature, it is hard to identify radical differences in style. The contrast here is with the modernists. A passage of writing about nature in D.H. Lawrence would be recognisably distinguished from a passage by E.M. Forster; Henry James's and Virginia Woolf's representations of consciousness take very distinct registers and narrative points of view. Not only is difference noticeable, it is - or was - also divisive. It is not particularly surprising or iconoclastic to hear of Evelyn Waugh complaining that "Lawrence had very meagre literary gifts," in the way it would be surprising to hear the same sort of thing said by Colm Toibin on John Banville. The two earlier writers are at different extremes, stylistically, and it is not surprising to see such literary opposition, even if today both writers can be incorporated as canonical. Indeed, modernism generally was unified more by its reaction against what was perceived to be the homogenously realist style of Victorian literature, than by a common agenda to produce its own, equally homogenous new style.

Some sort of homogeneity, though, does seem to be at work in contemporary literature, which lacks either a sense of what it is for or what it is against. Across my most recent reading list, there is a heavy debt to modernist authors, techniques, even basic plots. Smith's On Beauty reworks Forster's Howards End; Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty is indebted to The Great Gatsby; Regeneration uses the psychoanalytic dialogue to dramatise its characterisations of therapist and patient; McEwan's Saturday presents a contemporary Bloomsday, whilst Atonement ventriloquises Virginia Woolf; across her oeuvre, A.S. Byatt speaks back to any number of Victorian and modernist aesthetes. Most of these novels rely on the conventions of realism, but although they use omniscient narrators they do not ("Writing Workshop Day Two: Suspect Narration") succumb to a naive objectivity; events are always suspected, focalised through different points of view, contrasted against historical facts as we know them.

Although postmodernism still bickers at the ragged fringes, and makes occasional incursions (usually sneaking in via metafictional devices) the main crowd of literary writers flow onwards, combining a general realism with gentle pastiche, and giving assenting nods to readerly needs such as plausible and intriguing plotting. The voices of characters - by now of course multicultural and cutting across classes - speak accurately off the page. At the Chatterley trial the prosecuting barrister, Griffith-Jones, read aloud a passage of conversation that Malcolm Muggeridge had recently deemed “the most hilariously fatuous dialogue ever to be written in the English language":

Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd..."How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?"
"Good!"
"I’ll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh, holy saints!" He rolled his eyes to heaven. "But you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right."

Griffith-Jones asked, "Do you think future generations reading that conversation would get anything approaching the kind of way in which Royal Academicians conducted their conversations?" Griffith-Jones may have had prudish motives in pointing this out, but there can be little aesthetic defence here; it sounds awful, even to a modern ear, a kind of Wildean pastiche of how one imagines the upper classes might talk. There would be no excuse for such a failure in the era of television and the internet. Every novelist has their ear to the soap opera (probably sneakily overheard whilst they pretend to read The Guardian) and as a consequence can do everyone from the toff to the toe-rag in plausible voices. Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, for example, has the upper class affectations pitch perfect, and human, without ever descending to the unwitting caricature Lawrence produces. Compare the following conversation between the rich Toby and his friend Nick, about Toby's failed engagement to the daughter of even more wealthy Maurice:

"Of course he blames me for not hanging on to her, Maurice does. He thought it was a good match."
"It was a good match, darling, for her: far too fucking good."
"Mm, thanks, Nick."
[...]
"I suppose it wasn't all that great, you know, the sexual side of things."
[...]
"Oh..."
"You know, she called it 'doings'."
"That's not very promising, I agree."

There's a lot in here that convinces, particularly the reticent awkwardness of Toby's "the sexual side of things," which then becomes relegated to "it," which compares with his fiancee's even more embarrassed "doings." But as well as this recognisably human pitch, there are moments of class consciousness, most obviously in the "darling" but also in Nick's final "That's not very promising." Down the pub, told this story, my reply would be "Well that's a bit pants." Nick's eloquence at this moment between two lads talking about sex testifies to his Oxford education. Realism is the order of the day, and unlike Lawrence's, this works, presenting these two characters as at once similar to but differentiated from "ordinary" people. Whether this is a hallmark of the writing school ("Day Three: Dialogue") is beside the point; the point is that we cannot imagine any practiced writer making such a hash of the speech patterns of anyone, upper or lower class, as Lawrence does, and remaining a respected writer, because readers - themselves attuned by television to a broad variety of speech styles - would so immediately pick up on it. Only rarely can dialogue rupture at the seams of credibility and the author survive as a literary writer. Lawrence gets excused, because he is descriptive rather than dialogic, writes of the mind rather than the direct voice; the contemporary author must learn to do both.

As a final test of my thesis - no, less a thesis on the basis of my limited evidence, more a hunch or feeling - ask yourself this. In fifty years time, will we use the words McEwan-esque, Barnesian, Ishiguran, in the same way as we apply Lawrentian, Woolfian, Joycian, Jamesian (with a fair idea about what the latter signify)? Of course, I am being selective here. It is just as possible to tell a piece of Rushdie's playful magic realist writing from A.S. Byatt's style laden with learned references as it is to tell Gertrude Stein from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel that there has been a smoothing of stylistic differences. This is indicated by my readerly tastes. I would happily read both Rushie and Byatt, or both Amis and McEwan into the small hours, but would never take Stein away from my teacher's desk and into my reader's bed. Like supermarket wine, it is today hard to find a bad example of modern literary writing (though turn to the lager aisle, of course, and you will still find your Dan Browns and Jilly Coopers on discount).

However, lest this all sound like Lee Siegel's lament for the death of the great American novel, let me make myself clear. Immersing myself in contemporary fiction has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I correlate my enjoyment of a book with the ache in my back, caused by the pathologically slouched position my six foot frame adopts when I am living in the world of the book. And my back has been very sore, these last few weeks. The novel has been, since its birth, the democratic genre that opens its welcoming arms to a mass audience, whereas poetry seeks to secrete itself in the mind. Before politics, before demands that it represent the greatness of a nation through the adventure of its form, the novel has sought to make itself popular. And if stylistic invariance - if a consistent, educated way of writing that simply works - is the price of the persistence of literary fiction in an age of competing narrative multimedia, so be it.

Labels: creative writing, English Literature, style, The Program Era

Continuing my occasional self-help series on great writers who struggled to write (which began with Hugh Trevor-Roper), I was pleased today to find the following quote from Proust:

Since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was time I knew what I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, trying to find some subject … my mind would cease to function, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or that perhaps a malady of the brain was hindering its development.

I know how you feel, mate, as I sit procrastinating at my computer with numerous projects or subjects I feel I should be capable of writing on before the start of term, but which seemingly convert into large, vacant spaces the moment I try to think of them. But at least you managed to make up for lost time in the end; as for me, I only have three weeks until the start of the teaching year in which to get any serious writing done.

Labels: Proust, University Life, writing

I was going to blog a couple of weeks ago about the fact that the Pope is to hold a state visit to the UK, when it first began to hit the headlines. However, I did not get around to doing it back then - and I am glad that I waited, because in the interim the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has exposed how absurd it is that the Vatican can trace its "statehood" back to the Lateran Treaty, a 1929 concordat signed with the Fascist dictator, Mussolini. Whilst the Pope has every right to visit the UK, based solely on the suspect and ad-hoc political status of his "state" it ought not to cost the British taxpayer £12 million to host him. Would we be prepared to pay a similar amount for, say, the Prince of Liechtenstein? As happens with football matches, concerts, rallies and protests, the costs of policing and overseeing his visit ought to be borne, in part, by the evangelising Catholic Church.

Another good reason for waiting, which makes it a more appropriate time to blog about the Papal visit now, is that I am currently preparing Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty for teaching next term.

This is his fictional account - sprinkled with some fairly poorly disguised actors standing for actual historical figures - of homosexual life in political society in the years of Thatcherism. It is full of explicit gay sex scenes featuring the protagonist Nick, a recent graduate who is intellectually advanced but sexually adolescent and socially naive. Every man he sees (especially those who happen to turn around to present particularly pert buttocks, be they straight or gay or ambiguous), is focalised as if they are a potential snare for his bedroom. His sexual fantasies and exploits are slightly but not directly camp, are certainly very funny, and sometimes quite touching. The one thing sex is not in the novel is distinctly bad, although the Aids crisis looms towards the end of the novel. The more significant ethical judgements are reserved for Thatcherism and the class conflict caused as insular, upper-class Tory grandees systematically dismantle the state whilst scooping enormous sums of money for themselves, despite being neither bright nor talented. As one civil servant merrily puts it at a party, champagne in hand, "The economy's in ruins, no one's got a job, and we just don't care, it's bliss."

When they come into contact with other classes of people - ethnic minorities, cleaners and taxi drivers, gay lovers - they react with disgust. Against the social issue of the entrenched attitudes of the ruling upper class, the gay lifestyle, though omnipresent in the mind of Nick, is also a historical and ethical irrelevance.

Not so for the Roman Catholic Church, for which sex in general is terrifying, subversive, always potentially immoral and irreligious. No one represents this more dogmatically than the present Pope, referred to as God's Rottweiler as head of canon law. The religious think tank, Theos, recently conducted a survey of British attitudes to the Pope, which asked about the public's support for his social agenda as expressed in his third encyclical letter. A large majority of people agreed with his statements such as that "technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption," that "investment always has moral, as well as economic significance," or that "food and access to water are universal rights of all human beings." I would agree with these statements too. But then, I would agree with them even if Kim Jong-il had made them. However, do such statements really represent the full spectrum of the Pope's social teaching?


Leaving aside - so far as such a mass human crime should be pushed to the margins - the child abuse scandal, would as many people have agreed with some of his following statements:

• That Aids is a tragedy that cannot be alleviated by condom use, but that is actually exacerbated by it. 
• On the rise of feminism, that "Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women, in which the identity and role of one are emphasized to the disadvantage of the other, leading to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family." 
• That homosexuality is insidious and dangerous, and it is as important to save the world against homosexuality as it is to prevent environmental catastrophe.

Labels: English Literature, Pope, religion, The Line of Beauty

I just received word of a Higher Education Academy funded project, Sharing Practice, which is investigating "how academics represent, share and change their practices." One aspect of the project asks academics to keep diaries of their "everyday lives and normal routines," recording their activities on the 15th day of every month. For any academics out there who currently blog, this ought to be an interesting and easy project with which to get involved.

Labels: Sharing Practice, University Life

Zadie Smith's hilarious but touching familial drama, On Beauty, is in part set on a university campus. It features a professor of aesthetics whose late career finds him emotionally, intellectually and sexually stagnant.

Having read it recently, I cannot help but wonder if one of the principle reasons for the existence of Arts departments is so that they can provide fictional settings for sexual encounters between sagging academics and nubile young students (as happens in On Beauty), in campus novels which are written by graduates of such departments in real life (such as Smith). So many times - even in the novels of excellent, realist writers such as David Lodge, JM Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith - balding professors are irresistibly tugged into bed by stunningly bright and beautiful eighteen year old girls.

In my experience, this is such stuff as fiction is made on - and is not something I have ever known to be true of actual academic life (or at least, not in the furiously passionate way depicted in most campus novels). Nevertheless, let's keep this myth alive, as if hot blood really does pump through the gossipy corridors of the ivory towers, as if every closed door with a brass nameplate on it conceals illicit sexual liaisons. At least it gives departments of literature and their like a reason to exist, if only so that their graduates can go off and write bestselling fantasies about them.

Labels: campus novel, University Life

Having taught at university level for six years now (I know, I can't believe it either), I'd like to think that I know what I'm doing. I may not give a perfect tutorial every time; I may mismark an essay now and again; but on the whole, I am in my comfort zone when I am confronted by university students.

However, as the television adverts would have you believe, teaching younger kids is a unique challenge. Only those who can, teach students under the age of eighteen. Over the last year, my teaching credentials have been tested in this wholly different way, as I have run workshops for my university's Gifted and Talented programme for pupils aged 11 to 16, and for its scheme to encourage talented students from underprivileged backgrounds gain entry to what is a fairly elitist institution. I found that there was indeed an appreciable difference between teaching at university and junior levels, though not in a way I expected.

Neither workshop was particularly strenuous in terms of its material, the one being a practical session on how to write a blog, and the other involving a series of fun creative writing exercises. But both left me exhilarated in a way I do not get from university teaching. Teaching university students is a great privilege: they are (on the whole) motivated, highly intelligent, articulate. The atmosphere in a good tutorial room is one that can best be described as cultured enthusiasm. Whilst students and the tutor are usually passionate about the material, and hold strong views on it, these are expressed in ways that are intellectual and refined. We use theory to support out arguments, select evidence to explain a text. Our voices never get raised in anger or pleasure. We take it in turns to talk, and listen to each other carefully. The baser emotions of passionate feeling trickle through our words which are delivered with thought and care - as they rightly should be at an academic level.

Not so at the junior writing workshops. With twenty students in the room, these were noisy, bustling affairs. The kids chattered over each other, and although no one misbehaved, conversations happily drifted off the topic I was teaching. However, they were also utterly delightful, with delight meant in the most literal sense. They made me laugh, smile, joke with them. I know a conventional university tutorial has been successful when I come out of a tutorial room with my adrenaline pumping as if I have just been on a run, chasing down mazes of eager enquiry. Even after the best tutorial, though, I've never laughed out loud at the work we have done. Yet the junior scholars were genuinely entertaining, playing my word games and writing fake blog entries with imaginative abandon, joking with each other and with me as they did so. Both workshops were for students who are at the top of their classes, and I am under no illusions that their ability and good nature would not be uniform across a failing comprehensive. Nevertheless, it is good to know that the pleasures of teaching and learning can be sustained at all levels, from the very old (I taught a lady in her nineties for the OU last year) to the very young.

Labels: teaching, University Life