"Too heavy! Too heavy!" shouts the little demon who sits on my shoulder monitoring my performance. No doubt he's referring to the philosophical nature of my last two posts - on "Life" and "Death". Time to lighten up.
During my first two years at university in Scotland, I had the opportunity to sign up for two or three subsidiary subjects. The ones I picked were Sociology, Religious Studies and Swedish. These were on top of my two major subjects - English Studies and Education.
For Sociology there was reading to do and a couple of hour long lectures to attend each week. In addition, we had to attend weekly seminars with assigned lecturers. I was assigned to a group that was chaired by Dr Sheila Mitchell who had been at the university from its inception in the mid-sixties.
Each week, we had to read academic papers on particular aspects of sociology and then return to the seminars to discuss them. The reading was quite challenging and some of the others students in my seminar group soon gave up and just sat there like lemons. I was one of the few who soldiered on with the process and tried hard to participate in the connected discussions.
It was easy to see that Dr Mitchell was becoming frustrated with the seminar group. Sometimes she would pose questions related to the paper of the week and get no response. After a couple of months, she became so exasperated that she cried - as if she had been personally slighted. I recall her blurting out something like, "Why can't you get involved and answer my questions?".
It was as if she had completely failed to grasp that the elephant in the room was those academic papers. They were just too damned hard. None of us actively disliked Dr Mitchell. She was a nice woman and her command of sociological language and ideas was impressive.
After her tearful outburst, the students tried to up their game and rally round her. More effort was made to read the homework paper. In the following week's seminar, Dr Mitchell read out a couple of paragraphs. One of the other students in the group was a sweet young woman from Edinburgh named Morag. Very politely, Morag asked, "Excuse me Dr Mitchell but what is the precise difference between 'subjective' and 'objective'?"
You could have knocked me down with a feather and the look on Sheila Mitchell's face was priceless. I mean, there she was trying to encourage talk about higher level sociological notions and findings and here in the seminar room was a student who did not have a clue about subjectivity and objectivity. Basic terms that you might expect every university student to have grasped long ago. I sincerely hope that Dr Mitchell was enlightened in that moment but I am by no means sure that she was.
It is a memory that was made around fifty years ago and for some reason it has always stuck in my head. It wasn't Morag's fault. At least she was brave enough to pipe up with her question. The problem was the inappropriate nature of the core material. It just did not "fit" the clients.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/X4dM518
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