As part of my PGCE teacher training, I'm not just teaching... I'm also studying. For the most part, I find I'm enjoying being a student again. It's certainly better than the 9-5 drudge of office work that swallowed the last 20 years of my life. I like going to seminars. I enjoy class discussions and activities (though I can do without some of the "this is rubbish, why are we doing this, how is it relevant?" carping from my fellow students). I like getting feedback from my tutors. I just love the university atmosphere - it's a lot more relaxed than I remember. Then again, the campus in question is separate to the main uni and made up mostly of happily dull adult learners like me. Joy! I'm even enjoying getting involved with extra-curricular activities such as writing interviews for the university's marketing department and becoming class representative to give course feedback at the twice-yearly Student Panels. Nobody else wanted to do it, but I found it fascinating. Certainly more so than writing radio ads.
The only thing I don't like about being a student again is writing essays. It's not that actual essays themselves I have a problem with, it's the way the focus has shifted from the importance of content to the secondary matter (in my eyes, anyway) of referencing. When I did my original degree in the early 90s, you got an essay question, read a few books around the subject, wrote your findings up in your own words, threw in a few quotes, compiled a bibliography... and that was that. Nowadays every sentence, every idea, every bloody word has to be referenced to where you took it from, who else might have had that thought first or used those words in approximately the same order. Otherwise you're up on charges of plagiarism, your work gets referred, and you're made to stand before the Jedi Council to explain your actions before being excommunicated or burnt at the stake. And you know what's to blame for all this...?
The bloody internet, of course.
Way back in the day (yes, I'm a Soprano), when I wrote an essay, I went to the library, took out a few books (the same few books that everyone else was using) and got on with it. Nowadays I have instant access to thousands of books - not to mention all the journal articles and other students' essays that google will point you towards. But wait, there are also programmes which analyse your finished work and pick out key words and phrases to ascertain exactly where you stole every last thought... if you haven't bloody referenced it. Even if you have your own individual opinion on a subject, you better not voice it unless you can find someone else who's said it first. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to write for a specific section but I have to spend hours searching for an appropriate reference to either quote directly or paraphrase so that I can't be falsely accused of plagiarism. You wonder if stamping down on plagiarism might also be putting a stop to individual expression. We never had to worry about this before the bloody internet took over everything.
And don't even start me on which style of referencing I'm supposed to use. Oxford? No, Harvard. Ah, but which branch of Harvard...? Personally, I think I'll opt for the old Stan Lee footnote style. 'Nuff said, effendi!
