Okay everybody, yes, the link does still work, it's just that nothing has been posted since having got to the UK....it's been, uh, let's say a bit of an experience. Culture shock was always something that happened to unsuspecting tourists in slightly odd restaurants, or if you were thrown together with your hairy cousin Igor from Batslavia, but not really to the wordly travellers. However, after having settled down for a bit more than a year, travelling has now become something on a par with having emotional root canal. It hardly seems possible to get worse at something one has done for, oh, a quarter of a century, but it appears there is a limit to absolutely everything. There hardly seemed any point in conveying the dislocations associated with being outside one's "zone" -- funny, there's no "duck out of water" phraseology... so, the writing has been well reduced this past 6 weeks. But, and here's the bright spot, I acquired a camera and have been experimenting every weekend, when there were opportunities to see friends and be in real environments. So, I'm posting pictures on the condition that no one ask me how the rest of my trip was....
Hello Rosy,
ReplyDeleteLovely pics - very professional. So, how was... alright, I won't ask, but I'd love to know why it didn't 'work' so well for you this time!
David XX X
Hey, thanks! I hadn't realised how far my life has moved away from the standard, industrialised uni-kit systems that prevail more and more in the "modern" world. I'm not sure, but that it might be necessary for "efficiency's" sake. There seems, however, to be a lot of box-ticking and other tedious tasks aimed at justifying one's work, with the emphasis on covering one's back rather than doing good for, in this instance, the students. It seems like one day nobody will do anything but the admin around the job and the job will have disappeared altogether. Here, it seemed like the students, the lives, the minds, or gosh, anything so nebulous and unaccountable as the "soul" of the student have utterly disappeared already. It's about measures and charts and 6.0 or 6.5... But I had walked out of that into another kind of life. I just hadn't realised how far, or how difficult it would be to be thrown back into it.... Rosy
ReplyDeleteHello hello, do you remember your Warwick Modes of Reading student-turned-friend Naz? C'est moi! How are you? From this I gather you're in England at the moment? Get in touch! x
ReplyDeleteby the way, the blog's great :)