Spanish
life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Life
in Spain:-
- I caught a bit of an ad on TV offering help to Brits who'd lost their deposits on off-plan properties in Spain during the phony, construction-driven boom. Trying to find the company name on youtube, I came across this video and then this one. Might be of help to someone.
- President Rajoy was in the media yesterday, lauding tourism. Back on earth, here's some information on what 2 places are doing to hold back the rising tide. Canute-like??
Wider afield . . . Don
Quijones continues, here, to cast aspersions on the Italian banking
industry. And also on the European Central Bank. This,
he says to no one's great surprise, is
bending and breaking its own rules to keep Italy and, thus, the EU
project on the rails. As he puts it: The
European Commission has repeatedly threatened to impose fines on
Italy for breaching EU budget rules, but if it ever did, it would be
the ECB that would end up paying them.
Italy, he
opines, remains the Eurozone’s weakest
link. And with each passing day, as the economy grows more dependent
on ECB funding, it grows weaker.
Good
to welcome to Nutters Corner,
a first class member of the breed - 'Pastor' Robert Jefress - who is responsible for this
bit of wisdom: When it comes to how we
should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is
very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever
means necessary - including war - to stop evil. In
the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out
Kim Jong-Un. As one atheist commentator puts it: This is what
modern Christianity has become. Forget Jesus. Forget peace. Forget
turning the other cheek. It’s about incompetence, brute force, rash
thinking, and using God to justify the worst kinds of human behavior.
The only good news is that these mad theists are slowly but steadily
reducing as a percentage of the US population. Let's hope the world
survives to see them become as politically irrelevant as they are in
most (all?) other developed nations. But the evangelist pastors aren't the only nutters in the US-North Korea imbroglio, of course.
Attached is article articulating fears which have dogged me for years - on the ability of modern graduates to write proper English.
But, anyway, It's bullfight (corrida)
time of the year again here in Pontevedra city, as part of our 2 week
annual fiesta. Dedicated, I think, to the Wandering
Virgin. These days we can only afford 3
bullfights, which must be a huge disappointment to the peñas
(competing groups of aficionados)
whose members don't necessarily attend the corridas
but who, rather, spend the evening and night drinking, vomiting and
urinating – but not fighting - in and around Plaza de Teucro in the
old quarter. Not a night to go there then, unless you're happy to be
sprayed with red wine.
Finally . . . Last week I dug my 33 year old Raleigh bike out of the garage and had new tyres fitted to it. Yesterday, I parked my car as usual on the other side of the river and biked, rather than walked, into the old quarter. Although I doubted anyone would steal my old crock, I still secured it to a fence with the security chain. Or, rather, I didn't - as I couldn't remember the combination number of the lock. So I pretended to secure the bike by making it look as if the chain was locked. Which was a bit of a waste of time, as I'd only passed it between bits of the fence and neglected to pass it around any part of the bike.
Today's cartoon:-
THE ARTICLE
My fellow
lecturers won't say it in public, but students today are moaning,
illiterate snowflakes: Tibor
Fischer
When I tell people
who have had nothing to do with universities recently that I’ve
taught British undergraduates who are simply incapable of writing a
correct sentence in English, most smirk in disbelief. Perhaps because
I’m a writer of fiction they assume I’m indulging in some
dramatic exaggeration. When I raise this with fellow lecturers,
however, they nod mournfully.
There is still a
mania that everyone should go to university and every endeavour
should be a degree (whether sculpting or golf management). It’s had
a very bad effect on education.
There’s an
“everyone must pass” attitude, which is compounded by the “sick
note” epidemic. The student who is currently suing Oxford
University because it allegedly “didn’t take her anxiety
seriously enough” isn’t an unusual figure.
Lecturers don’t
like to speak out about this because life is precarious in the
academic world, but in private I don’t come across anyone who
disagrees with what I’m about to say. Here goes.
Almost every fourth
essay you have to mark has a cover sheet pleading extenuating
circumstances: Asperger’s, autism, anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD,
dyslexia, dyspraxia. In my day, extenuating circumstances meant that
your family had died in a car crash a month before your finals.
And if you don’t
pass, no need to worry because you’ll almost certainly have
the chance of a resit or a resubmission. Essentially, if you can be
bothered to turn up, you’ll get a degree.
When I suggested to
my department head that it might be beneficial to axe one or two
students to gee up the performance of the rest, he commented, without
any hint of irony: “We can’t fail them, because then they’d
leave.”
I taught English
literature for four years at Christ Church University in Canterbury.
I taught some 120 first year undergrads, of whom I asked the
question: “What is a sentence?”
Only six came up
with the formula: subject, verb, object (and two of them were foreign
students). They hadn’t heard of this grammar stuff. Some were even
shaky on what an adjective is. And these weren’t physicists or
business studies students, this was the literature class.
Everyone is guilty.
The Labour Party for comprehensive education (I went to a
comprehensive. It was indeed egalitarian, in that everyone got a
mediocre education). Margaret Thatcher for the turn your
shed-into-a-university policy. Tony Blair for abolishing the
requirement for foreign languages.
And then of course
the Equality Act, which requires Universities to make “reasonable
adjustment” for those less able. What a gloriously flexible,
litigious word “reasonable” is. Again, I doubt many academics
will go on record with this, but I had experiences with students who
had some “disorder” who were extraordinarily able in using their
disability to their advantage.
It’s the job of a
university to strive for excellence (although that’s tricky to
define in the arts). This idea that a university is in some way in
loco parentis or a carer obliged to wipe bottoms is misguided.
It’s wonderful if
universities can provide that sort of extra-curricular support. But
that’s not their purpose. It’s their job to set a high standard,
and it’s the students’ to reach it, whatever their difficulties.
In the humanities we
seem to have a system where many students pay a lot of money, learn
very little and gain very little employability. The students I
mentioned who are functionally illiterate represent perhaps only one
per cent, three, five? But there they are, at university.
The real problem is
the much larger group who don’t really have the tools to benefit
fully from a course, which is quite often not that demanding.
The educational
absurdity of Dickens’s Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby is
being recreated in our arts faculties, where all you need to do is
read a couple of books (or watch the DVDs), rehash some platitudes
about racism, gender stereotypes, climate change and say Foucault to
scrape a degree.
I can’t think of a
solution to this, but I suggest we stop kidding ourselves that things
don’t need to be tightened up. Or as one of my despairing
colleagues proposed: “Why doesn’t the government just give
everyone a PhD and get it over with?”
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