Yesterday I heard the sad news of the death, at the age of 90, of American physicist and radio astronomer Arno Penzias.
I’ve used the above image hundreds of times in popular talks. It shows Robert W. Wilson (left) and Arno A. Penzias (right) standing in front of the famous horn antenna that (accidentally) discovered what we now know to be the cosmic microwave background, radiation left over after the Big Bang.
Penzias and Wilson made their historic measurements in 1964, published their results in 1965, and received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978. At the time of this experiment, the scientists were working at Bell Telephone Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, on Project Echo. The antenna was built to receive radio signals bounced off a passive satellite in a low Earth orbit to check the feasibility of satellite radio communication. They found excess noise in their receiver, which was eventually identified as a relic of a time when the Universe was extremely hot. Coincidentally, the theory of this yet undiscovered radiation was being worked on by Bob Dicke and his group in Princeton at about the same time (and also in New Jersey). Discussions ensued, and the discovery paper by Penzias & Wilson appeared in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965 beside a paper by Dicke et al. giving the theoretical interpretation.
The discovery of the cosmic microwave background was probably the most important result in observational cosmology after that of the Hubble expansion and it paved the way for the establishment and further development of the Big Bang theory. One of the two discoverers of the CMB has now left us, leaving a priceless legacy.
Today, 2nd December 2023, is the centenary of the birth of the most renowned opera singer of her time, Maria Callas. I couldn’t let this occasion pass without posting a tribute, Tonight I’ll be sipping wine and listening to some historic recordings of her. I think every classical radio station in the world will tonight be paying tribute to this remarkable artist.
Maria Callas was born on December 2nd 1923 in New York city, of Greek parents who had moved there the previous year, and christened Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulou. Her mother, disenchanted with her deteriorating marriage, abandoned her husband (Maria’s father) and took Maria and her sister back to Athens in 1937. Maria enrolled at the National Conservatoire of Greece the same year after winning a scholarship with the quality of her voice, which
was warm, lyrical, intense; it swirled and flared like a flame and filled the air with melodious reverberations.
At this age, Maria was a rather plump young lady with a rather deep singing voice. Initially, she aspired to be a contralto but at the Conservatoire she was encouraged instead to become a dramatic soprano. Accordingly, she underwent special training to raise her natural pitch (or tessitura) and learned how to control her remarkable voice more accurately so she could sing in a sufficiently disciplined fashion that she could take on the dazzling coloratura passages that she would perform in later years with such success. She also worked on her chest tones to broaden the scope of her voice in the mezzo region. Although she became more technically refined as a singer during this period, there were some things that didn’t change. One was the sheer power of her voice, which is something that we tend to notice less in these days of microphones and studio recordings. People who heard her sing live confess to being shocked at the sheer scale of sound she could deliver without amplification. Perhaps more tellingly, she eschewed many of the devices sopranos tended to use to control the highest notes (usually involving some alteration of the throat to produce accuracy at the expense of a thinner and more constricted tone). When Callas went for a high note, she always did so in a full-throated manner. This often produced a piercing sound that could be intensely dramatic, even to the extent of almost knocking you out of your seat, but it was a very risky approach for a live performance. Audiences simply weren’t used to hearing a coloratura sing with such volume and in such a whole-hearted way. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was certainly remarkable and often very moving. It was this aspect of her voice that led her friend Tito Gobbi (who sang with her in Tosca) to call it una grande vociaccia, which I translate in my schoolboy Italian as meaning something like “a big ugly voice”. That isn’t meant to be as disparaging as it sounds (Gobbi was a great admirer of Callas’ singing).
Having listened to lots of recordings of Maria Callas I have to admit that they are certainly not all good. Sometimes the voice didn’t come off at all. Unkindly, one colleague said that she “sang with her ovaries”. When she talked about her own voice, Callas herself often referred to it as if it were some independent creature over which she had very little control. Anyway, whatever the reason, when she was bad she was definitely bad. But I adopt the philosophy that one should judge artists (and scientists, for that matter) by their best work rather than their worst, and when Callas was good she was simply phenomenal, like a sublime and irresistible force of nature. Nobody else could bring characters to life in the same way. That’s why they called her La Divina.
Although her talent was very raw in the beginning there was no question that she always had a voice of exceptional power and dramatic intensity. When she started singing professionally she immediately attracted lavish praise from the critics not just for her voice but also for her acting. As a young soprano she sang in an astonishing variety of operas, including Wagner‘s Tristan und Isoldeand Die Walküre, neither of which one would now associate with Callas.
Maria Callas as Elvira in ‘I Puritani’, Teatro la Fenice, Venice, 1949Maria Callas as Violetta in `La Traviata’, Covent Garden, London, 1958
It was in the late 1940s that Callas began to take an interest in the type of opera that would really make her name. Bel canto opera was rather unfashionable at that time, probably because audiences preferred the grittier and more realistic verismo style. Virtually single-handed, Callas resurrected the bel canto canon by injecting a true sense of drama into works which had previously just been seen as vehicles for the singers to demonstrate their art. Callas brought an entirely new dimension to the great operas by Bellini (Norma, I Puritani, La Somnambula…) and Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor, Anna Bolena), although she was sufficiently versatile to also perform brilliantly in the verismo syle of Verdi and Puccini as well as lesser known composers such as Giordano (Andrea Chenier). Recordings of many of these performances are available, but it is sad that this glorious period of her singing career happened just a bit before high quality equipment was available so the true glory of her voice isn’t always evident.
In 1953, Callas decided that she wanted to change her appearance, perhaps so she would look more appropriate for the parts she was playing on stage. At the time she weighed almost 200lbs. In order to lose weight as quickly as possible, she followed the barbarous but highly effective expedient of swallowing a tapeworm. She lost 80lbs in a matter of months. The dramatic loss of weight changed her body and her face, emphasizing her high angular cheekbones and giving her a striking look very well suited to the opera stage. But it also affected her voice somewhat, especially at the upper end where she seems to have found it more difficult to avoid the dreaded “wobble” which was one of the alleged imperfections that critics tended to dwell upon.
Callas also had very poor eyesight which required her to wear very thick spectacles in order to see at all, a thing she refused to do onstage with the result that she was virtually blind during performances. In fact, during a performance of Tosca at Covent Garden she leant too far over a candle and her hair caught fire. Improvising magnificently, Tito Gobbi, as the loathsome Scarpia, extinguished the fire by throwing water at her before the audience had noticed. Although they weren’t much use for seeing with, her eyes were a great asset for her acting, in turns flashing like a demon then shining like an angel.
After her weight loss, Callas was suddenly no longer just a wonderful singer but also a strikingly beautiful woman. Her career took a back seat as she started to revel in the glamorous lifestyle that opened up in front of her. Her voice deteriorated and she performed rather less frequently. Eventually she embarked on a love affair with Aristotle Onassis, a notorious serial collector of trophy women. She hoped to marry him but he abandoned her to marry Jackie Kennedy, widow of John F. Kennedy.
She never really recovered from the failure of this affair, retired from singing and lived out the last years of her life as a virtual recluse in her apartment in Paris. She died in 1977.
I had heard a lot about Maria Callas when I was younger, but the recordings that I listened to (generally from the 1960s) were really not very good, as her voice was undoubtedly much diminished by then. I just assumed that, as is the case with many artists, the legend of Callas was all mere hype. Then, about 20 years ago, I was listening to BBC Radio 3 and they played the final scenes of the great 1954 recording of Norma with Callas in the title role, conducted by Tullio Serafin. I was completely overwhelmed by the emotion of it and tears flowed freely from my eyes. I’ve always had a tendency to blub when I hear really beautiful music, but as I’ve got older I’ve learned not to be embarrassed by it.
In England, Callas is probably best remembered for her performances in Tosca in Covent Garden. I have recordings of her in that role and they are really wonderful. But there are many fine recordings of Tosca by other singers, some of which are almost as good. In the case of Norma, though, there isn’t any other performance that comes within a mile of the Callas version. Or if there is, I’ve yet to hear it.
Now I know that there are some people, even opera lovers, who just don’t get Callas at all (just look at the comment boards on Youtube, etc). I grant that she wasn’t always the most accurate singer, and I don’t think you could say her voice had a purely classical beauty. But even if you don’t like her voice you have to admit that she revitalized the opera stage and brought a new public into the theatres. I can’t imagine what the state of opera would be now, if there hadn’t been a Callas, and you can’t argue that she is now an iconic figure. What I admire most about her is that, like it or loath it, her voice is instantly recognizable. In this sense, she always puts me in mind of a kind of operatic version of Billie Holliday. She’s a far cry from the many bland mediocrities that pass themselves off as opera singers nowadays.
I’m going to end with the obligatory clips from Youtube. There’s a lot of Callas on there, not all of it good. I’ve chosen a couple of items, although neither of them has a proper video. The first was performed live in 1955 in front of the notoriously difficult audience at La Scala in Milan and recorded from a radio broadcast so that the sound quality is very poor. A studio recording of this aria, from Andrea Chenier, features most movingly in the film Philadelphia. This live version, however, is notable for a number of reasons. One is that you get some idea of the power of the Callas voice in the way she pushes aside the entire orchestra and is even able to cut through the distortions introduced by the rather primitive recording technology. The second thing is that she sings it so beautifully, with such feeling, lovely phrasing, and so much colour and vitality. Listen to the way the texture of her voice matches perfectly her changing emotions as she tells her story. The shattering, climactic high C that occurs near the end is a perfect example of what I was saying above. She stabs this note out like her life depended on it. It sends shivers down my spine and clearly had the same effect on the audience. The thunderous applause that follows the end of this aria is quite frightening in its intensity, but gives a good idea how much her public adored her. If you can put up with the lo-fi recording, this is certainly a better performance than the studio version.
The final piece has to be from Norma. I think Bellini is a wonderful composer of opera, but he doesn’t make life easy for the singers. There’s never any doubling of the vocal line by the orchestra so the singer is very exposed. This doesn’t bother Maria Callas. This is the famous aria Casta Diva, which has become a kind of signature tune for her and it’s one of the pieces that she always seemed to perform beautifully. It might be a bit hackneyed but I love it and, after all, it’s my blog. There’s also a nice compilation of pictures.
I wonder how many times and in how many places, Casta Diva is being played today?
I spent several hours today wandering around the excellent Musée Fabre; for a little flavour of the place, see the little video I took in one of the rooms here. The largest part of the collection is French art, particularly from the 16th to 19th century, although there are also quite a few rooms dedicated to “northern” paintings, principally of Flemish origin. The gallery was founded by François-Xavier Fabre (1766-1837) who was born and died in Montpellier but spent most of his productive life as an artist in Italy (especially Florence). Fabre gave most of his own paintings to start the gallery, and there are many of examples of his work here, but many of his contemporaries are represented too, as well as earlier French artists such as Nicolas Poussin, and later ones such as Henri Matisse. Among the non-French artists are Peter-Paul Rubens, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Wright of Derby, to name but a few.
The permanent collection is accompanied by an exhibition of modern art by Pierre Soulages, who passed away last year, and who specialized in sombre abstracts which make quite a contrast with the permanent collection.
Anyway, here is a gallery of random pictures I took. If you click on the image it will tell you who the artist was: the one by Soulages is obvious; the very fine bronze sculpture is Le Coureur (1955) by Germaine Richier, an retrospective of her work finished earlier this month (as you can see from the banner in the first picture). Check out the little boy in the very sepulchral scene depicting a vigil for the dead, who is looking at the viewer as if to say “What are you doing here?”
Having a few hours to spare this morning, I took a walk around Montpellier in the sunshine. I can tell you that the layout of the old part of the city, which hasn’t changed since mediaeval times, is a labyrinth in which it is very easy to get lost but if you’re not going anywhere in particular it’s fun wandering around. At night it’s very atmospheric too. Anyway, here are some random pics I took on the way. As you can see, the weather was lovely and you always get interesting shadows from the winter sun…
While I am on the blog, I thought I would mention one of Montpellier’s famous historical connections, Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566), more usually known as Nostradamus, who studied medicine at the University here for a while before he was expelled. I searched the Prophecies of Nostradamus which you can find online, and found no reference to my visit to Montpellier. Incidentally, the University of Montpellier was founded in 1220 so is one of the oldest universities in the world. La Tour de la Babotte was part of the fortifications of the old city and was later used for a time as an astronomical observatory.
P.S. the oldest remains in Montpellier are medieval. The Romans never settled here; the main settlement in the area was Maguelone, on the coast. The administrative centre of the region was moved to Montpellier, which is 10km inland, to avoid raids from pirates.
Continuing my attempt to catch up on a backlog of reading I have now finished The Magician by Colm Tóibín. A couple of years ago I attended a Zoom event featuring the author Colm Tóibín talking about this book, which is a fictionalised account of the life of Thomas Mann. It’s taken me a ridiculous long time to get round to it, but it was worth the wait.
The life of Thomas Mann was colourful, to say the least. Born in the German city of Lübeck in 1875, Mann’s father was a wealthy merchant and his mother was from Brazil. His elder brother Heinrich Mann was also a novelist essayist and playwright of considerable reputation. Despite his barely concealed homosexuality, Thomas Mann married Katia Pringsheim in 1905, his wife seemingly not minding about his sexual orientation. He led a comfortable life until he began to see the signs of the coming descent of Europe into the First World War. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and went into exile from Nazism in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1944. In the post-War McCarthyite era he was made to feel less welcome in the USA for having visited East Germany and consequently under suspicion for communist sympathies. Not wanting to return to Germany, he spent most of the last years of his life in Zurich. He died in 1955 at the age of 80.
In some ways this work is reminiscent of The Dream of the Celt which I reviewed a few weeks ago, in that it’s a fictionalised biography, based partially on material found in diaries and with a theme of (partly) suppressed same-sex desire; several of his six offspring were gay or bisexual too. On the other hand I don’t think it’s accurate to think of this book so much as a biography of Thomas Mann but more of a biography of the late 19th and early 20th Century with Mann as the lens. In fact I finished the book without feeling that I knew very much at all about Thomas Mann’s character and personality. That’s probably deliberate as he seems to have cultivated an air of mystery surrounding himself. We follow Mann and his large family through the events leading up to both World Wars, and the effect these tumultuous times had on his siblings and offspring. His family endured more than its fair share of tragedy, with multiple suicides and other heartbreak.
An interesting aspect is the collection of little character sketches this book gives us of famous people with whom Mann interacted in his life. Mann was himself very famous indeed both in Europe and America. Tóibín gives us (not always flattering) views, through Mann’s eyes of, among many others: Gustav Mahler, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. Incidentally, Auden married Mann’s daughter Erika so she could get British citizenship; the marriage was never consummated.
It’s a beautiful book, written in a style that frequently seems to mimic Mann’s own prose. Juxtaposing the ideas in his novels with the events happening when they were being written, both within his own family and in the wider world, provides fascinating insights. I have only read a couple of Thomas Mann’s books: Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain. Knowing more about his life, I now want to read these again and also read the others.
And so as one book disappears from my reading list, several more appear…
P.S. This is the novel in which the Mann family sits around listening to a gramophone record of In fernem Land sung by Leo Slezak I mentioned a few days ago.
As we approach Remembrance Sunday in a time of rising conflict, it seems apt to post the following poem written by Siegfried Sassoon, called the To the Warmongers:
I’m back again from hell With loathsome thoughts to sell; Secrets of death to tell; And horrors from the abyss. Young faces bleared with blood, Sucked down into the mud, You shall hear things like this, Till the tormented slain Crawl round and once again, With limbs that twist awry Moan out their brutish pain, As for the fighters pass them by. For you our battles shine With triumph half-divine; And the glory of the dead Kindles in each proud eye. But a curse is on my head, That shall not be unsaid, And the wounds in my heart are red, For I have watched them die.
My attempt to catch up with a backlog of reading while on sabbatical has now brought me to Modern Ireland, by R.F. Foster, the paperback version of which, shown above, I bought way back in 2018 but have only just finished reading. In the following I’ll describe the scope of the book and make a few observations.
The book was first published in 1988 so it obviously can’t deal with more recent events such as the Good Friday Agreement. The narrative stops almost 50 years ago in 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday and just before Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973, but since it starts way back in 1600 one can forgive Roy Foster for not covering such recent events. The start is in what is usually termed the early modern period, but if truth be told much of Irish society at that point was still organized on mediaeval lines.
To set the scene, Foster starts with a description of the three main sections of the population of Ireland in 1600. These were the (Gaelic and Catholic) Irish, the “Old English”, descendants of the 12th Century conquest of part of the country, who were also Catholic, and the Protestant “New English” who arrived with the Tudor plantations. There were tensions between all three of these groups.
The rest of the book is divided into four parts, roughly one per century: Part I covers the continued Elizabethan plantation of Ireland, rebellions against it, the devastation caused by Cromwell’s so-called “pacification”, and the Penal Laws that basically outlawed the Catholic faith. In Part II Foster discusses a period often called The Ascendancy which showed the consolidation of power in the hands of a Protestant – specifically Anglican – ruling class, though there was a sizeable community of non-conformist Protestants, chiefly Presbyterians, who were regarded by Anglicans with almost as much suspicion as the Catholics. This Part ends with yet another failed rebellion, involving Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, against the backdrop of the French revolution. Up until the Act of Union of 1800, Ireland had its own Parliament; after that Irish MPs were sent to the House of Commons in Westminster. The century covered by Part III includes the Irish Famine, rising levels of rural violence, and issues of land reform, and various attempts to deliver some form of Home Rule; it ends with Charles Stewart Parnell. Part IV covers the Easter Rising, War of Independence, Civil War, Partition, the creation of the Irish Free State, and the eventual formation of the Irish Republic. A running theme through all four Parts is a recognition of how historical forces – and not only religion – shaped Ulster in a different way from the rest of Ireland.
As I’ve said before on this blog, it disturbs me quite how little of this history I was taught at school in England so I found it valuable to read a detailed scholarly work whose main message is that everything is much more complex than simple narratives – those peddled by politicians, for example – would have you believe. This is primarily a revisionist history, calling much of received wisdom into question. That said, it’s probably not the best book for a newcomer to Irish history. Foster does assume knowledge of quite a few of the major events and, while reading it, I did have to look quite a few things up. Much is said in the jacket reviews of the author’s writing style. To be honest, I found it sometimes rather mannered and self-conscious, though with some enjoyably arch humour thrown in for good measure. It’s thoroughly researched, as far as that is possible when primary sources are sketchy and contemporary records usually written by someone with an axe to grind. It does seem to rely mainly on documents written in English, however, so one might argue that introduces quite a bias. I gather that there is much greater emphasis among contemporary Irish historians on records written in Irish (Gaelic).
The book is rather heavy on footnotes, too. Usually I dislike these, but in this case they are mostly little biographical sketches of important figures which would have disrupted the flow if included in the main text, and I found many of them valuable. Just to be perverse, I have to say I liked his liberal use of semicolons. Though dense, the books is as accessible as I think a scholarly work can be and although I am not so much a scholar of history as an interested bystander, I learnt a lot. It also made me want to learn more, especially about the period between the death of Parnell in 1891 and the Easter Rising of 1916.
It seems apt to finish with an excerpt that illustrates a theme that crops up repeatedly during the 23 chapters of the book:
Irish history in the long period since the completion of the Elizabethan conquest concerned a great deal more than the definition of Irishness against Britishness; this survey has attempted to indicate as much. But that sense of difference comes strongly through, though its expression was conditioned by altering circumstances, and adapted for different interest-groups, as the years passed. If the claims of cultural maturity and a new European identity advanced by the 1970s can be substantiated, it may be by the hope of a more relaxed and inclusive definition of Irishness, and a less constricted view of Irish history.
It’s 29th October 2023, which marks the end of “Summer Time” in Europe. Accordingly, the temperature in Barcelona has plummetted to 22°C. I have to make a flying visit to the UK next week and I suspect that I’m in for a bit of a shock, having adjusted to these balmy climes. I have numerous telecons next week too and, since some parts of the world will be still on Daylight Saving Time (or whatever) there’s potential for confusion in the timing.
Some time ago, before the Covid-19 Pandemic, the European Parliament approved a directive that would abolish `Daylight Saving Time’. Unfortunately that plan has been ‘paused’ and there’s no sign of it happening for the foreseeable future. I’ve long felt that the annual ritual of putting the clocks forward in the Spring and back again in the Autumn was a waste of time effort, so I’ll be glad when this silly practice is terminated. It would be far better in my view to stick with a single Mean Time throughout the year. I’m only disappointed that this hasn’t happened already.
The marvellous poster above is from 1916, when British Summer Time was introduced. I was surprised to learn recently that the practice of changing clocks backwards and forwards in the UK is only about a hundred years old and was introduced as an emergency measure in wartime. To be honest I’m also surprised that the practice persists to this day, as I can’t see any real advantage in it. Any institution or organisation that really wants to change its working hours in summer can easily do so, but the world of work is far more flexible nowadays than it was a hundred years ago and I think very few would feel the need.
Anyway, while I am on about Mean Time, here is a another poster from 1916.
Until October 1916, clocks in Ireland were set to Dublin Mean Time, as defined at Dunsink Observatory, rather than at Greenwich. The adoption of GMT in Ireland was driven largely by the fact that the British authorities found that the time difference between Dublin and London had confused telegraphic communications during the Easter Rising earlier in 1916. Its imposition was therefore, at least in part, intended to bring Ireland under closer control. This did not go down well with Irish nationalists.
Ireland had not moved to Summer Time with Britain in May 1916 because of the Easter Rising. Dublin Mean Time was 25 minutes 21 seconds behind GMT but the change to GMT was introduced in Ireland at the same time as BST ended in the UK, hence the alteration by one hour minus 25 minutes 21 seconds, i.e. 34 minutes and 39 seconds as in the poster.
Britain will probably never scrap British Summer Time on the grounds that whatever the EU does must necessarily be bad. What will happen to Northern Ireland when Ireland scraps Daylight Saving Time is yet to be seen.
Some time ago – was it really over a decade? – I wrote a piece about the optimum size of modules in physics teaching. I was still in the United Kingdom then so my ramblings were based on a framework in which undergraduate students would take 120 credits per year, usually divided into two semesters of 60 credits each. In Cardiff, for instance, most modules were (and still are) 10 credits but some core material was delivered in 20 credit modules. In the case of Sussex, to give a contrasting example, the standard “quantum” of teaching was the 15 credit module. I actually preferred the latter because that would allow the lecturer to go into greater depth, students would be only be studying four modules in a semester (instead of six if the curriculum consisted of 10 credit modules), and there would be fewer examinations. In short, the curriculum would be less “bitty”.
In Maynooth the size of modules is reckoned using the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) which takes a full year of undergraduate teaching to be 60 credits rather than 120 in the UK, but the conversion between the two is a simple factor of two. In Maynooth the “standard” unit of teaching is 5 credits, with some 10 credit modules thrown in (usually extending over two semesters, e.g. projects). This is similar to the Cardiff system. The exception concerns first-year modules, which are 7.5 credits each because students take four modules in their first year so they have to be 30/4=7.5 credits each. The first year is therefore like the Sussex system. It changes to a five-credit quantum from Year 2 onwards because students do three subjects at that stage.
I find it interesting to compare this with the arrangements here in Barcelona (and elsewhere in Spain). Here the ECTS credit size is used, but the standard module is six credits, not five, and year-long projects here are 12 credits rather than 10. The effect of this is that students generally study five modules at a time (or four plus a project). To add to the fun there are also some 9 credit modules, so a semester could be made up of combinations of 6-credit and 9-credit chunks as long as the total adds up to 30.
Anyway, the main point of all this is to illustrate the joy of the sexagesimal system which derives from the fact that 60, being a superior composite number, has so many integer divisors: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 15, 20, and 30. The Babylonians knew a thing or two!
When I was a lad, during the 1970s, the term Spanish Practices was used pejoratively in a union-bashing sense to describe restrictive practices in the workplace. Until recently I thought it was a modern invention that relied on a stereotypical view of Spanish people as being lazy. In fact it seems the term dates back to Tudor times and is religious in origin, referring to Roman Catholic rites, in contrast to the simpler Protestant forms of worship. Anyway, none of that is what this post is about. I just used the title as clickbait.
I’ve been here in Barcelona, and working in the University of Barcelona, for four weeks now and I thought I’d share a few observations about differences in practice here and in the Ireland (and the UK).
The other night I went out for dinner with colleagues from the Department. The restaurant was much closer to the University than to my flat so instead of going home first I stayed in my office and walked straight there. My route out of the building takes me past a number of teaching rooms. During this warm weather, most of the rooms have the doors open so it’s easy to have a quick look at what’s going on inside. On my way out at about 7.30pm I was surprised to see a number of classes still going on, and they weren’t sparsely attended either.
In Maynooth the latest regular lectures finish at 6pm. Even during the 5pm to 6pm lectures, many students have to leave before the end to catch the one and only bus back to their place of residence. Here the public transport system is so good that isn’t really an issue even for those who don’t live near the campus. As far as I know lectures start at 9am, so students potentially have a very long day. They work hard.
I have to say that I wouldn’t like to have teach late in the evening. I used to do that on Fridays at Queen Mary for the MSc course and didn’t enjoy it. I don’t mind doing 9am lectures, though, but I don’t think students agree – partly because of the difficulty of getting to campus at that time.
In the Faculty of Physics, all the lecture halls, classrooms and laboratories are in one building rather than spread around the campus like they are in Maynooth (and many places in the UK). Fortunately, the building has been designed with students in mind and there is plenty of space for students to use socially or for private study between teaching sessions.
In this picture you can see the inner courtyard of the building occupied by the Faculties of Chemistry and Physics. It’s a big open space, with teaching rooms, etc, on either side. In the far right-hand corner there is a café/bar where one can buy lunch, a coffee, or even a beer, to be consumed either inside or in the seating area in the courtyard. Many students seem to prefer bring their own lunch and eat it in this space., although the food available is pretty good and cheap compared to back home.
As well as being able to eat and drink here, there is plenty of room for students simply to hang out or to study, either alone or in groups. If they don’t feel like that they can use the tram, bus or Metro to go home, and come back later if they have a long gap between classes. None of this is possible at Maynooth.
This particular kind of open space would not work so well in Ireland or the UK because of the weather, though you can probably see in the picture that there had been a bit of rain before I took the photograph, but I hope I’ve made the point that having social spaces makes a huge amount of difference to the student experience, not least because it feels that the University has thought about them. In the neoliberal system that dominates in the UK and Ireland, students are simply a commodity, a source of revenue, to be crammed into every available space and processed as cheaply as possible. In Maynooth students have been, and are being, forced to pay an extra levy for a notional student centre that will probably never be built.
The contrast is very disheartening.
Getting back to educational matters, another thing I’ve noticed walking past classrooms is that it’s not unusual to see a student standing at the blackboard in front of the class going through a problem. I’ve seen that a number of times with quite large classes. Sometimes we ask students to do that sort of thing in tutorials, but I’ve never done so in a full lecture. I think our students would be shocked if we asked, but it’s clearly not unexpected here. That’s a Spanish Practice I’d be quite happy to try.
The views presented here are personal and not necessarily those of my employer (or anyone else for that matter).
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In the Dark 