From "Oxford Life"

(by Dacre Balsden)

1. Lectures Start on Monday

Lectures start on the first Monday of term. Lecturers are sometimes in fashion; lectures as such are never in fashion.

Why take notes when you could as well read it all in a book? The question is unanswerable.

In some subjects the lecture-list is itself carefully organized by the Faculty, so that all the necessary lectures are given and given in the terms in which undergraduates need them. In other faculties the freedom of the lecturer is not so rigidly curtailed.* Let a lecturer lecture on whatever subject he chosen. If he hopes for an audience, he will choose a subject useful to undergraduates, and he will lecture on it twice a week. If he does not care about the size of his audience and prefers to lecture on some small field of learning on which he is researching or writing a learned paper, he will lecture one hour a week. "Thursday at 11, Mr Smooth, 'Plutarch, On the Virtue of Women.' "**

Dons*** in general hate lectures as much as undergraduates. That is why they lecture so badly. Nobody has ever taught them how to lecture well. There is a Delegacy**** in Oxford for the training of schoolmasters; there is no delegacy for the training of dons.

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* to be rigidly curtailed – быть строго ограниченным

** Плутарх «О женской добродетели»

*** a don – преподаватель

**** Delegacy of Training – Управление по подготовке школьных Учителей

On the first Monday the lecturer has his largest audience for the term. Where there are a hundred young men and women today, there will, in eight weeks times, be no more than five or six. Where there is an audience of two today, there will perhaps be one next week and, after that, no audience at all.

A professor's lecture is sometimes like the "pas scul" of a prima ballerina. He appears; he lectures; he retires. And then after an interval, he lectures again. But the College tutor's public lecture is an interruption in a week otherwise devoted to teaching pupils in his rooms, listening to their essays and talking about them. These are "private hours" – "tutes," as the undergraduates call them, or tutorials. Sometimes a pupil comes along, sometimes in a pair, sometimes with two or three others.

Young tutors find the hour too long, old tutors find it too short. Undergraduates find it very long indeed and if there is no clock in the room, they find it even longer. When you reach a tutor's age, it is less easy to listen than to talk, and observant undergraduates quickly realize that their tutors criticize in detail the final sentences of their essays but give little evidence of having observed the rest*. There is a splendid story of the great Ingram Bywater**.

"Ah," he said, in greeting, to his pupil, "what is the subject of you essay? Expediency? Splendid. Then will you read what you have written?"

At the end, he roused himself. He said, "For the next week, will you write an essay on– er – Expediency? That is all."

Had he slept through the whole of the essay? Or was he uttering the most devastating criticism?*** The pupils never knew.