Freshers week

Tuesday is the beginning of the Cambridge academic year – and thousands of new students have turned up. Going through the elaborate welcoming routine, I find it impossible not to remember what it felt like more than 30 years ago when  I was in their place.

For a start it was much less elaborate. Nowadays the kids go through almost a solid week of induction, so intensive that I can’t imagine much of it goes in. There are briefings on Health and Safety, tours of the various libraries, computer training sessions, meetings with student reps of the Faculty, JCR tea parties and “bops”, plagiarism avoidance classes (well almost) . . .  and that is before they have been to meet any of their teachers and lecturers.

I remember it all being much more down to earth. A big college “feast” with a pep talk from the Principal, a brief meeting with our Tutor and Director of Studies – and off we went, in at the deep end (and amazingly we did soon manage to fathom how the University Library worked).

Apart from the predictable anxieties and indiscretions of the first few days (which I do not intend to share!), I now remember only two things of those first encounters with the College Fellows.

The first was telling the Principal, mingling after her pep talk, that I did not intend to eat “in hall” while I was at Newnham, but to make coq au vin (it was the 70s) in the student kitchens. I must have delivered this with unnecessary emotional force, since 30 years on she remembers our conversation too.
 
The second was the meeting with my excellent, but appropriately terrifying, Director of Studies, who reminded us very firmly that we were at Cambridge at the expense of the tax-payer  -- and that tax-payers would expect us to work just as hard as they did: 40 hours a week, 48 weeks a year.

If someone had said to me then that just a few decades later I myself would be standing up in front of a new group of undergraduates, I would never have believed it – and frankly even now it’s a bit hard to take in. What do you say? In my case, what am I going to say to the assembled first year Classicists in the university – more than 80 of them – on Wednesday?

Well, sadly, you can’t use the tax-payer line anymore. They’d probably lynch you. Most of these students, after all, are taking on a whacking debt for the privilege of a university education.

Most likely I shall concentrate, like last year, on the different kind of skills they will need at university from at school. Whatever the merits and demerits of the modern sixth-form curriculum, it certainly doesn’t teach independent learning. When they arrive, they are used to a “target” approach to education (if you make the following four points and show that you can recognise a subjunctive you will get an A). They also tend to imagine that the only time they are actually learning something is when someone is standing up in front of them, teaching them.

I shall try to convince them (with only a modicum of success to judge by past performance) that intellectual endeavour goes beyond targets – and that the time when they really learn the most is probably not in the classroom but when they are by themselves, reading hard in the library.

The point I want them to grasp is that one of the aims of the devoted, skilled, inspirational and expensive teaching we offer is to give them the confidence to be able to explore the world of learning on their own.

Comments

[E]

The students' classmates are contributing a large slice of their earnings to the taxman, and some of it does find its way to the university, so that is still a valid argument.

I also think it is important to hammer home the point that the freshers are all winners. It is easy for them to feel overwhelmed by meeting hundreds of clever people and to forget that they are definitely clever too.

[Brian Taylor]

I heartily endorse your aim to give the ability to explore the world of learning on one's own. During the past three years I have studied Latin and Classical Greek at Cambridge University at weekends and at home. I am now reading Caesar and Euripides in the original.
See www.cont-ed.cam.ac.uk

[Serafina]

I love the first week: freshers are so, well, fresh, all starry-eyed and bushy-tailed. But I'm curious to see how freshers' attitudes will change once the top-up fees thing really kicks in, and when they realize that despite the 3k+ they each 'contribute', the library still doesn't have enough books, the residence halls are still hovels and most lecturers are still struggling to teach classes of 100+, mark heaps of essays and give some sort of feedback to all. Or am I being unduly apocalyptic? To echo OU's Jackie, not all places are Cambridge...

[Neil Murphy]

Good luck. I suggest you smile at them, say "welcome, enjoy the party, first lecture is on blah date time and place, see you there." A 'first drink is on me' would go down well I expect.

All I remember about my fresher's week was the joy at finding how many drinking places were within easy walking distance of my residence, and that there was a rugby club. I don't remember meeting any lecturers.

For those who are worried I may have wasted taxpayer's money, I partied relentlessly for three years, learned judo, played rugby for college and uni and got a degree (the latter event causing much confusion amongst many friends). Now I hold a well paying job and have a mortgage, so am a fully paid up and responsible member of society.

[vinod]

i am glad to know that you have takentime off from the busy schedule prior freshers day to contribute to the blog.it tells about the sincerity of purpose and dedication to the objectives of teaching that you subconciously have in you inherently.i am sure the students under you are fortunate.keep up the good work mary!

[Jackie]

You could try telling your students they are extremely lucky. I took my undergraduate degree with the Open University, and am taking my MA with the same organisation. We didn't have the huge asset of a University library on site, and really had to self motivate from day one. I am lucky to be situated reasonably close to a Classics library I can access, but my borrowing rights are not as generous as the 'on site' students. Our tutors are brilliant, but remote. And a substantial majority of us are holding down full time jobs while studying. I would give a great deal to be one of your students at Cambridge.