The Tutorials: Oh The Agony!

I decided to do this entry in two seperate parts, otherwise it would be too long, and thus here is the part about the tutorials.

The first tutorial was painful. It was in Chelmsford, at the university which I had never been to. I arrived late, which didn't help, I felt like a fuckwit. I nestled down between a couple of people. The tiny room was full, there were at least 15 people there which was a complete departure from DD100 tutorials, where, more often than not, I was the only student to turn up. We went around the room saying who we were and why we were doing the course. I made the mistake of being a smart arse and saying that I was doing AA100 because "I didn't like sociology". My Tutor picked up on that (he agreed that he didn't either), and I made a mental note to take it a bit further at the end of the tutorial. And I did, I think I came on a bit strong and told him in no uncertain terms that AA100 was, from what I had seen so far, just thinly veiled sociology with pretty pictures. He concurred but said that it got better. I hadn't given him a chance. Guilt set in the following day.

As for the people in the tutorial group. I was one of only 2 people in the room who was not doing the course with the aim of becoming a teacher. It made my skin crawl to think that so many people in one concentrated area wanted to be school teachers. I had to hold my tongue, otherwise I would have told them what it's really like being a teacher - just from what I have observed, mind you. I couldn't believe the shallowness, the 'easy-way-out-ness' of it all. It really is like those spoof "Become a teacher" adverts from Armstrong and Miller. I don't just say this because I don't want to be a teacher, and therefore I don't think anyone should do anything different to me: that's just pathetic and it's not that at all. If you want to become a teacher, then fine, be my guest and become a teacher, but don't come crawling back to me when you find it too difficult to cope with, because it's not as though I didn't warn you. I quite fancy the idea of ending up as a University Tutor or lecturer - at least the people I would come into contact with truly want to be there and are not there solely out of legal obligation.

Another thing that I realised from the tutorial was that born and bred Essex people (out of the tutorial group there were only 2/3 of us who were not from Essex) really have no idea of the world outside of their own living room windows. They were openly admitting that they had never heard of a lot of things that they had been reading, even though these are cultural legends. They'd never seen these films or unbelivably famous paintings - where have you been for your entire lives? I was, once again, the youngest person there, so where have these people been for the first 40 or so years of their lives? I truly felt as though I was the only person in the room, bar the tutor (no idea what he was thinking), who had any idea of culture or cultural identity. I know that out of everyone in the room I was probably the one to have most recently been in a classroom setting, but does that excuse the inability to shut the fuck up and listen? No, of course it doesn't. There was no reason why people in that group could not have listened rather than asking the poor guy to repeat everything a couple of times. This was one of the moments that I almost couldn't stifle my disgust and I just wanted to beat people about the head with the text books. It made me realise that, perhaps in a complete paradox, I was both at a very comfortable depth and completely out of it.

The second tutorial - I was softer, much softer towards the tutor, but still pretty steely towards the other students. Only 9 of us turned up this time - was it something I said? It was again one of those moments when I couldn't believe what I was hearing from the other students. The second part of our assignment is to compare two paintings and they were bemoaning this saying that they couldn't do it. In my head, I was screaming. "Look at the two freaking paintings! Write down the differences between them. It's not bloody rocket science", and that is pretty much what the assignment booklet tells you to do, point out the differences. I really felt for the guy this time as people were asking him about it. He even prepared a sheet for us to take home about "Reading Paintings" - helps me, I guess it's going to help those who were bemoaning it. This tutorial, no-one wanted anything repeating, and TFFT. He's got a PhD for fuck's sake, he probably didn't envisage when he stepped up to receive it all those years ago, that he would be spending his future tutoring a load of Essex born and bred, culturally inept monsters who are incapable of listening to or reading even the simplest of instructions.

This all sounds snobbish, that I know and can identify. I probably shouldn't say a lot of this, but I must otherwise I feel as though my brain is going to explode - not that that feeling is in fact any different to any other day of the week at any time of the year. I find my steely, cold resolve and patience often surprises me, I find it amazing at times that I can keep my tongue. I guess I have had a fair amount of experience with that over the years. But, it is beyond me how some people can have such a little concept of so many cultural items and have never seen them. I get the impression I would be one of few people who goes to museums.

There was one fleeting moment in this second tutorial where I felt "I should be doing this. Don't give up". The tutor asked a question and was eliciting responses from us. He got a couple of responses from people but wanted more. I opened my damn huge mouth and gave a response that was a million light years away from the type of answer everyone else was giving. It was one of these moments when the room falls silent and everyone turns to look at you, either through shock, disgust or sheer bemusement. Everyone did just that. There was at least one instance of each of those three emotions. They looked at me like I was a nutjob, an asshat, as though I had been smoking something, and no, they didn't want any of it. He paused. Looked at me straight on. He seemed to be slightly taken aback by it, but he said he would talk to me about it at another time.

At the end of the tutorial I just left. I didn't feel as though I could hang around and talk about it - I was still a nutjob in the eyes of the rest of the students, that was an image that I didn't really want to perpetuate.

In case you're curious, the question asked was about emotions and the colour "red". Other students were answering "Anger" and "Hate". My answer was "December".