Moodle, Doddle and Bear.
Not a team of Dickensian accountants or the stars of a children’s YouTube channel, but electronic platforms to aid learning and collaboration. Who knew? I’ll tell you who didn’t know. Me.
Last time I was a fresher was 1996. Peter Andre had just knocked The Spice Girls from number one, beer was £1 a pint and I’d have no sooner called a lecturer by their first name than I would have admitted I didn’t really have a preference between Blur and Oasis. (Just kidding. Blur.)
24 years later I am a fresher again and the experience is almost unrecognisable. Covid-19 has put paid to the hustle and bustle of registering and societies who once relied on piles of freebies at a Freshers’ Fayre to entice excited newbies must now bag a Teams slot. Friend-making has moved from the SU bar to WhatsApp, requiring a mastery of strange new social protocols for which I have not received a manual.
When I was 19, going to university was a way of killing three years before finally having to grow up. At 43, leaving behind a well-paid and secure job for four years has required a great deal more consideration. As a result I am approaching things a bit differently.
Scheduling a Trinitarian Theology lecture from 9-11 on a Monday morning was never going to encourage full attendance. I managed the first half of it a few times—before rolling my hungover self out at the half-way break and back to my bed—before just accepting defeat and not even bothering to show up. 25% of my contact hours which were sacrificed on the altar of student drinking.
Teenage me felt like a total outsider at university. I’d come from the countryside and had never been clubbing. Everything I knew about ‘fashion’ had been gleaned from the swishy-haired sloanes at the private school I’d needed a scholarship to get in to and translated not one jot to the streets of Manchester. GCSEs and A levels had come easily so I had no clue how to study and no one to ask.
Now I’m an outsider in a completely different way. I’m old. I’m too deaf and hangover-intolerant to go clubbing even if I wanted to, which I don’t. My current take on fashion is ‘is it comfortable and do I like it?’ I’ve spent 19 years teaching kids how to learn so now it’s time to put my money where my whiteboard is.
They say youth is wasted on the young. I’m not sure that’s true, but I know a university education wasn’t a particularly efficient use of three of my young years and lots of my parents’ money. The next four years is my chance for a do-over and I am grabbing it. If anyone wants me, I’m the one at the front of the class with the eager face and the highlighter pens.
