I was trying to explain to my dad how the university system works in England, through the eyes of a mature and autistic student. Some knowledge of the names given to pre-decimal coinage would help. Here is an extract from the email I sent.
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Now for the lesson in how higher education works in 2010. Nobody, by the way, gives you a glossary of terms. They must either assume you know or you'll have to work it out for yourself.
Module: in old money is a subject or topic. Whilst my degree is BA (Hons) Journalism Studies, we have different modules to complete within it. Some are elective and others mandatory. (I don't think I have to explain the difference to you).
Semester: American (shudder) for academic term.
We have three modules (subjects) each semester (term). For me, at the moment, it is 1- applied project* or dissertation (I still don't know what one of those is) which is mandatory. 2- Journalism Professional Practices. Mandatory. 3- Sexuality and Culture. Elective.
*My applied project is you, dad.
The JPP is a horrible, autism hostile, module I would never have chosen because the unwritten rules are endless.
My one elective module is Sexuality and Culture. How this relates at all to journalistic anything escapes me but going to uni on Friday afternoons and talking about sex is actually quite a refreshing change. Just when you think you have been there and done that so many times you wish you had bought the t-shirt factory, rethink. Experience tells you to hide your hands in your armpits when you really want to throw at least one in the air and say, 'Miss? Miss? What's rimming, miss?' And dominatrix? Well, I used to love the double five. That was my favourite. Oh, sorry, I was thinking dominoes. Must be getting old. Do you think shove ha'penny means something rude these days? I mean, you can't say 'pussy' without setting a 13 year-old off laughing. As if anyone these days knows what an ha'penny is. I dread to think what they'd do with a tanner. Old money; old people; And there was this girl who said one of those deeply meaningful things that began with well, twenty years ago.... and I missed the rest of it because inside I was falling over laughing. How did we forget that sex was invented by teenagers and copulation is the number of policemen down at the local nick?
As for home study. You could call it research or homework that nobody sets but our written work is telling on how much we have done. In my case, not necessarily very much. There is something of an art to producing a piece of work which ticks all the boxes but is just outside of the experience of the marker. For instance, last year, I did a piece for the module called 'Investigation and Research Skills' and missed out loads of quite important information because our module leader (teacher) had never been to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It comes in handy, being old. You realise that grown-ups don't know everything and a lot of the others still look at the module and course leaders as grown-ups, somehow bigger than they are. They are like puppies, trying to sound profound, eager to please. My advantage is in being more mercenary now. I ask what gets marks and have taught the relevant few how to break down information into comprehensible bullet points. The dog has taught its master how to bark.
Plagiarism is something of a media panic. It is far harder to achieve than most people outside of univeristies think and has been going on since Adam were a lad. There are computer programs which essays can be run through that throw alerts up when something looks as though it has been copied and pasted from a website. There must have been youngsters copying, long hand, huge chunks of stuff they fished out of text books ever since Gutenberg created the printing press. Just as youth insists it invented sex, so its impudence assumes the ignorance of the old.
But I still laughed behind my hand when I read the word crap in a recent edition of The Oldie.
I'll get back to my essay now.
Image courtesy of www.cartoonstock.com
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