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Feb. 15th, 2003 06:51 pmRecently I've been very occupied with preparing for giving the first OU tutorial in my course. I immorally made multiple copies of Old English manuscript facsimiles at the UL, for my students to look at and try to transcribe, and then translate. The passage was a bit of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle pertaining to Viking hordes sweeping down from Northampton and Leicester against Luton and Hook Norton, which seemed amusingly appropriate for a tutorial held in Leicester :-) I also had handouts of a couple of passages written by Chomsky - one a technical work on syntax (1957), one a chatty interview about war with Iraq printed in this week's Big Issue - this was to compare different proportions of borrowed words in two very different sorts of text. Finally, there was an excerpt from the COED - part of the entry for LESS - along with a couple of usenet posts about the correctness of less vs. fewer in countable contexts. This was to spark discussion of standardization and language attitudes.
So, today, I got up unpleasantly early for a Saturday (7 am, after very little sleep following a nice V-day meal and a few episodes of Red Dwarf and Blackadder) and caught the train to Leicester. I don't think I've ever been there before; it seems a nice, well-signposted place on first impressions. The Adult Education Centre was very well-organized. About half my student group turned up, which made for a good-sized group to get practical exercises and discussions going. I'd worried that my students would be shy and impossible to persuade to talk (as I usually found with Cambridge undergrads) - however, this was far from the case. My students were a wonderfully varied bunch - ages ranged from 22 to late 50s, with the average about 35, I guess; men and women; different ethnic backgrounds; all sorts of different life-circumstances. They all seemed very keen to talk about their experiences of using English (and their attitudes, which were mostly quite prescriptive - I had to bite my tongue a bit, as we're not supposed to be too dogmatic; still, I suspect they'll change their views a bit once they work through a bit more of the course: so much language bigotry is based on ignorance and misinformation).
In general, I think it went well - they seemed to enjoy talking to each other, and doing the practical exercises (they particularly liked it when I read out the OE passage with reconstructed OE pronunciation). I didn't find it nearly so nerve-wracking as lecturing, for some reason. I don't know if that's because I have more self-confidence now, or more experience, or just because the context of the tuition was quite different from Cambridge.
Anyway, now I have lots of forms to fill in (the OU is very keen on monitoring its Associate Lecturers at every stage). I also have a report to write for my prospective publisher, so that he can make a presentation to OUP's directors, and give me a firm answer on whether they want to go ahead.
In other news, G and I are still looking for work that will actually pay the rent.
So, today, I got up unpleasantly early for a Saturday (7 am, after very little sleep following a nice V-day meal and a few episodes of Red Dwarf and Blackadder) and caught the train to Leicester. I don't think I've ever been there before; it seems a nice, well-signposted place on first impressions. The Adult Education Centre was very well-organized. About half my student group turned up, which made for a good-sized group to get practical exercises and discussions going. I'd worried that my students would be shy and impossible to persuade to talk (as I usually found with Cambridge undergrads) - however, this was far from the case. My students were a wonderfully varied bunch - ages ranged from 22 to late 50s, with the average about 35, I guess; men and women; different ethnic backgrounds; all sorts of different life-circumstances. They all seemed very keen to talk about their experiences of using English (and their attitudes, which were mostly quite prescriptive - I had to bite my tongue a bit, as we're not supposed to be too dogmatic; still, I suspect they'll change their views a bit once they work through a bit more of the course: so much language bigotry is based on ignorance and misinformation).
In general, I think it went well - they seemed to enjoy talking to each other, and doing the practical exercises (they particularly liked it when I read out the OE passage with reconstructed OE pronunciation). I didn't find it nearly so nerve-wracking as lecturing, for some reason. I don't know if that's because I have more self-confidence now, or more experience, or just because the context of the tuition was quite different from Cambridge.
Anyway, now I have lots of forms to fill in (the OU is very keen on monitoring its Associate Lecturers at every stage). I also have a report to write for my prospective publisher, so that he can make a presentation to OUP's directors, and give me a firm answer on whether they want to go ahead.
In other news, G and I are still looking for work that will actually pay the rent.
