This confirms my worst fears about the plagiarism epidemic. It’s drearily predictable that the person whose conscience is entirely clear as she makes up to £1000 a week writing essays for students to pass off as their own is a lawyer by trade.
Bring back exams! Actually, that is happening, at several HEIs of my acquaintance. It seems to be the only way.
BBC – Berkshire – voices2005 – Management-speak
Thanks to Anglepoise for this collection of appallingly mangled English. It’s a kind of Black Museum of the worst offenders.
I’ve changed the title of this thread – “Little things for which I have an irrational loathing” is clumsy, and also, I’ve decided, inaccurate. Contemplating these loathsome things, I came to the conclusion that my loathing was not irrational, but actually entirely justifiable and correct, and that anyone who disagreed with me was wrong. Hence the snappier title.
So – today’s object of disaffection is management speak. The English language is the most glorious and infinitely subtle way of communicating on this planet. It might not mean much to be born English these days compared to the glory days of Empire, but being a native speaker of English is a huge advantage. The language is supreme as an instrument of expression, capable of conveying nuances of the most subtle kind. It’s a lot to do with the way that successive waves of invaders have left their mark without erasing the previous vernacular. It means we have lots of synonyms, but with slightly different connotations. Freedom and liberty mean the same, don’t they? But there’s something stirring about the Anglo-Saxon freedom that the Anglo -French liberty doesn’t manage. You can think of other examples.
So why, given the vast resources of the language, do people resort to the ludicrous gibberish that is management speak? Not only do they write in this strange hybrid language, which reads as if written by an Albanian on a correspondence course, but they talk it too. It’s hideous. What sort of stuff do I mean? Using “impact” and “benchmark” as verbs, saying “delivery” for “teaching”, “rolling out” instead of introducing… Using ridiculous buzz phrases – “best practice”, “value for money”, saying “issues” instead of problems…
It’s not uncommon in certain circles to hear this kind of thing:
“We’ve got some issues impacting around delivery. We need to benchmark best practice, and see if we can get vfm on this, yeah?” And if it’s said with a rising tone, then my trigger finger gets very twitchy.
I did enjoy a remark in the Radio 4 show Weak at the Top, featuring an obnoxious Jeremy Clarkson type. “When someone from HR speaks, it’s like a neutron bomb – the building’s standing, but everyone’s dead.”
-and HR (or Human Resources) instead of Personnel is a classic piece of management jargon. Ugh!
EducationGuardian.co.uk | comment | We are not amuth’d
Here’s a lovely piece by the always entertaining John Sutherland. It is distressing that so much unintelligible gibberish gets passed off as learned criticism these days. I always pass on to students the words of Nobel-winning scientist Peter Medawar:
“No-one who sincerely believes he has something important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood.”
If only they all followed that advice…
Telegraph | Education | I cheat us all by doing my pupils’ work
Most people who work in education are aware of the situation described here. It’s now reaching epidemic proportions. I’m coming across more and more undergraduates with apparently good A levels who flounder hopelessly when asked to take part in any kind of academic discourse. What’s worse, the culture of target setting and league tables is creeping into HE. Already there are worrying signs of declining standards, and increasingly bizarre methods of coping with the Google generation, who just don’t “get” plagiarism.
We may just have to rethink the whole process of assessment before grades become utterly meaningless.
The Observer | Review | The future’s in the past
Here’s a marvellous piece by the ridiculously multi-talented Stephen Fry on the importance of History. Should be compulsory reading for all with any influence on education policy.
…of what I expect will be a very long series. First up, then – personalised number plates. I remember explaining the British number plate system to a German friend, and almost causing him to choke on his beer when I revealed how much people will pay for a particularly apt plate. I suppose if you could get AB 1, assuming your initials were AB, then it might be worth a bob or two, but actually, who cares? Well, quite a lot of people it seems, judging by the lengths people go to in order to have something approximating to a name on their plate.
The worst kind are the ones which have no discernible meaning, but which have to be imaginatively reinterpreted to yield some kind of name. You know the ones – a B can kind of be fashioned by putting a 1 and a 3 close together, or a 5 stands duty for an S. Really desperate ones also use a strategically placed screw with a black cap to sort of make a 1 into an L. I saw one recently where J2NNE was supposed to spell Jenny. How do I know? Because of the most tragic aspect of the enterprise, in which the owner has to put what the plate is supposed to spell in very small letters under the actual registration number.
My all time favourite was one such, although this was not on a personalised plate. No, under a perfectly ordinary plate, someone had seen fit to have added “Jeanina Topping BSc (Hons) QTS”. Maybe the car was a graduation present from Mummy and Daddy Topping…
For reasons which are actually mundane, but which I won’t reveal in order to maintain an air of spurious mystery, I have to visit Birmingham twice a year. Once again this time, I stayed at Jonathan’s, and it is a strange experience. Jonathan’s presents itself as a Victorian “experience”- and it is – but far from some country park setting, it is actually located on an unprepossessing roundabout (is there any other kind?) in a rather down at heel suburb.
So it’s odd to be resident in a room which might have served as Sherlock Holmes’s study – dark maroon wallpaper, mahogony furniture, cushions, knick-knacks and ornaments in abundance – not in Baker Street but in darkest Brum. My room didn’t feature correspondence fixed to the mantlepiece with a knife, but did have a bowler-hatted and union jack-waistcoated Teddy Bear. Possibly that belonged to Watson…
Apart from its intense Victoriana, Jonathan’s is quirky because of its system of naming rather than numbering rooms. I was in Whiteheath. The labyrinthine interior is navigated by means of coloured lines on the ceiling which correspond to the tube map design on the “passport” they give you when you check in. It is actually quite good fun, but the drawback is the location. For my purposes, it’s fine – it’s a few minutes’ drive from where I need to be – but it seems odd where it is. You expect a Travel Lodge and you get number 221b.
The growing influence of blogs in public policy is well-documented. Norman Geras and the Euston Manifesto is a blog phenonomenon. More evidence that blogs are changing things is the appearance of Alasdair Gray’s blog. Here’s a leading writer and artist publishing thoughts and new material freely to the web. This, it seems to me, is what the web is for.
Those pesky detainees, eh? What to do when they insist on pulling publicity stunts? I have a modest proposal. We all know these are very dangerous men, locked up for years because they are terrorists conducting a secret war against America – so secret in fact, that we can’t possibly allow any of the evidence into the public domain. But if they were terrorists in, say, Fallujah, the US wouldn’t be arresting them – they’d be killing them. So, why not ship them to Iraq, and, er, treat them like other insurgents. Problem solved!