John and Sally are two part-time assistant lecturers in a provincial third-level college of fairly high education in the West of Siberia. They share a desk and a computer in a camel tent at the back of the Administration complex. It’s the start of term and we hear them now ‘up the hill’ - venting - over a glass or two of Guinnevar and Lime.
John: Well it’s our first week back Sal, and in keeping with tradition I suppose we’ll be expected to come up with some sort of uninformed and provocatively barb-ed outpourings.
Sally: Yes, I always think that’s nice. I think we usually call it satire.
John: Nobody else does.
Sally: [shuffles feet] Can’t think of anything.
John: You’ve had a good summer then.
Sally: it was a bit wet. Yeah - the highlight of it for me was Tubberkurski’s Old Fayre Day. The sight of donkeys swimming backwards down Vladimir Putin Street was something else.
John: Excited were they?
Sally: Swept away.
John: How’s the new office? I haven’t been in yet.
Sally: You mean the office accommodation. They’ve given us new tent-pegs - and a life raft.
John: HRM are very generous like that.
Sally: HRM - is that anything to do with the royal family?
John: I don’t think so. Human Resource Management. Used to be called Personnel I think.
Sally: It’s funny how things change their names isn’t it?
John: Yeah.
Sally: I’ve just been to a meeting of lecturing staff - a Program Review it was called - not to be confused with a Programmatic Review - which is something entirely different.
John: Of course.
Sally: Anyway, it turned out to be programmatic. We discussed how we could do new and exciting things - just like last year. It was in a different room I suppose.
John: Thrusting. Anyway, what were the new and exciting things, apart from teaching properly?
Sally: No, Teaching and Learning was 2006 - along with Learning Outcomes - whatever they were.
John: Anything to do with the student learning the subject?
Sally: That would have been considered a rather naive view. You had to say - up front - what proficiencies the student would be able to demonstrate, how they would demonstrate them, and how you would measure that demonstration. [frowns]
John: Oh I remember. I thought at the time a syllabus and an exam would do that. The syllabus told them what they had to study and the exam how well they’d studied it.
Sally: Very naïve.
John: Good enough for Newton and Einstein.
Sally: Einstein didn’t do terribly well at school though, did he?
John: Perhaps he wasn’t clear on his Learning Outcomes.
[Both laugh]
Sally: And Descartes eschewed book learning completely in his early days.
John: Is Descartes the man who said: “I think, therefore I am.”?
Sally: Yeah - and between you and me - I think he probably was.
[Pause]
John: I’ll get ‘em in. Same again Sal?
Sally: No, I think I’ll have a can of Burn. The caffeine will do me good.
[John gets the drinks]
John: They only had Relentless Inferno - hope that’s alright.
Sally: Super duper. [takes a swig] Yes! - Anyway, the Program Review. They called in this sociology chap to tell us about LLL.
John: LLL?
Sally: Lifelong Learning.
John: Lifelong learning - surely that’s what we all do anyway?
Sally: I think it means evening classes and correspondence courses.
John: Oh.
Sally: Apparently it’s all about sex.
John: I thought sex was 2007.
Sally: Pay attention. Both the Chair and the sociologist mentioned sex so it looks like it’s still pretty important. They said we had to make computing sexy.
John: They’re going to have to hire all new staff then.
Sally: Our computing courses had to have sex in them, they said.
John: I’m all for that, but I thought the students generally sorted out that side of things for themselves.
Sally: I spent seven years studying Computer Science and I can’t recall a single lecture on sex. So it’s a subject I know very little about.
John: Perhaps you weren’t clear on your learning outcomes.
Sally: No, the library never seemed to be open. Even when it was the long seats always seemed to be taken. Anyway in Lifelong Learning there’s a problem with retention apparently, as there is all round.
John: The students are forgetful?
Sally: They drift away. We lose them.
John: In my college we used to call that ‘natural wastage’. Rather cruel, I thought.
Sally: So it was rebranded - into its opposite - retention. The Chair suggested rigorous attendance-register-keeping by lecturers.
John: Presumably so you could be even more sure they weren’t there.
Sally: Anyway the sociologist suggested - given the economic downturn and all and the general situation and whatnot - perhaps we could get unemployed plasterers and bricklayers in - to fill in the gaps.
John: Sexy. Only a sociologist would be capable of thinking so far outside the box.
Sally: Where would we be without them? Do I think I could teach a bricklayer computing?
John: Do you think you could teach a sociologist computing?
[Sally spits a mouthful of Relentless Inferno all over John’s extra-casual-just-came-back-from-holidays-and-can’t-really-believe-I’m-here-but-anyway-this-is-how-cool-I-looked T-shirt.]
Sally: Or bricklaying.
[Sally cops the Guinnevar and Lime.]
Both: Good luck with the new term. See you up the hill.
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