Today was the start of the final semester of my first year at university and thank god for that.
I'm not enjoying it and today was confusing and demoralising. A tea and kittens sort of day.
I'm not studying anthropology this year, despite it being the subject I signed up to do, because the entire first year is now 'interdisciplinary' and one third of it (40 credits) is taken up with two bullshit 'graduate attribute' modules that set out to equip what is mostly a year of tired, jaded seniors like me who have had quite enough of that bollocks already thank you, with 'employability skills'.
Any anthropology I'm getting is being crammed into one-hour-a-week tutorials, with modules like 'Introduction to Fieldwork' - you know, all that irrelevant stuff - dropped to make room for the graduate attribute crap.
The problem is they didn't tell the 2020 intake about the switch to interdisciplinary/graduate attribute modules until after everybody had enrolled and the year was underway. The prospectus, the website, still had the previous year's information. Literally, nobody knew they would not be studying the subjects they signed up for until it was too late.
When the complaints started rolling in, the university said students had been consulted, everybody was happy, now please shut up and go away - and they haven't deviated from that line since.
The module we started this morning was a graduate attribute module and it was a fucking shambles. Sixty miserable and resentful students with no idea what was going on and a sergeant major classics tutor determined to shout down any questions and force us through regardless.
It's the Creative Writing students I feel sorriest for. Instead of being taught Creative Writing, they're receiving a wonderful grounding in disparate humanities subjects and vapid corporate employability videos.
The one good thing to come out of it is seeing how organised, tenacious and focused in their outrage some the younger students are. They are not taking this lying down. Gives me hope for the future, that does.
Only took one photo today, of my dusty bookshelf, when I realised it was getting dark and I hadn't taken a picture yet. It caught my eye on the way to put the kettle on.
Today's Photo: The Kitten Shelf
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