All in a Don's Day (14 page)

12 July 2010

The retiring Chair of Ofsted (the ‘Office for Standards in Education'), Zenna Atkins, has got herself into trouble (and no doubt been misquoted) in saying that it might be good for kids to learn to cope with the occasional bad teacher. Even if she is misquoted, I am with her. The idea that public services can be free from human frailty is surely bonkers. We all need to learn how to recognise and deal with a teacher/policeman/ tax-inspector/doctor we don't entirely trust – just as we learn how to deal with a private business that does not give us what we asked for. The appalling encroachment of (illusory) tick-box competence is something we need to resist; we are always going to have to deal with people who are below par (that's the definition of ‘par', after all).

But the big question is not ‘What do you do with bad teachers?' but ‘How do you know who a bad teacher is?'

When I was an undergraduate, I was very fierce about what I considered bad lectures. In fact, a good friend of mine on one occasion went up to the then Professor of Greek (one Professor K***) and told him publicly that his lectures were a disgrace to the university. The truth is that they both were and weren't, but my friend's fully frontal confrontation was a much more effective way of raising the issue than pouring her heart out in an anonymous questionnaire.

But when I was a student activist in the 1970s, I got a shock.

We activists decided to run the first ever (I think) Classics Faculty lecture questionnaire, hoping to out the malefactors,
the dull, the unconscientious (the Professor of Greek among them). The result was not what we had expected. Sure, our view on who the best and worst were got broad confirmation, but there wasn't one lecturer who was not rated tops by somebody. Unless you took the view that minority tastes were not to be catered for, then you could really not pillory anyone at all (although you might want to nudge a few of them in a slightly more popular direction).

Having done the lecturing game myself now for 30 years or more, I think that there is an even bigger problem. It is how and
when
you judge whether teaching has been a success. It is all well and good to correlate people's lectures and supervisions with final degree results. But that can't be the be-all and end-all. Because getting a first or a 2.1 isn't in the end what really matters; it's what you do with the degree next – 5, 10, 20, 30 years down the road. And of course some of our most impressive citizens got 2.2s years ago, and they have been inspired no doubt in the long term by what might have seemed at the time to be, at best, inefficient teaching.

The trouble about assessing bad teaching is that some of what you think is bad aged 21 turns out to be the most influential and inspirational when you look back aged 41 – even Professor K***'s.

No, a bad teacher is a bad teacher and time does not alter the fact. Over the decades there is no way I can warm to the school teacher who dictated incomprehensible notes on Palmerston and Gladstone to be learned by heart, or to the Cambridge law
lecturer who just read out sections of the recommended text book (Buckland) in the most dreary voice imaginable. We coped with the history teacher by playing his game or going through the motions, and with the law lecturer by simply staying away, so we did learn something about adaptation and survival … and how not to be bad teachers ourselves.

BOB

Mary′s witty bit on the meaning of par is what idiomatic, spontaneous English is all about, even for those who dislike golf. As to lectures, many people must have been encouraged by Leavis′s remark that if students wanted what they got from most lectures, they could go to the books it came from.

PETER WOOD

I′m going to have to confess that I don′t see what ′Mary′s witty bit on the meaning of par′ is. Can you explain? I hope there′s not a confusion here between par and average, as that′s the sort of tangle Ofsted itself has often got caught up in.

MICHAEL BULLEY

Anthony Powell said that in learning to be a writer he profited more from bad authors, whose vices he could recognise and learn to avoid, than from good ones, whose virtues were often inimitable. Might there be some application of this via negativa to the teacher question?

PL

26 July 2010

By and large, Greek and Roman military command had it relatively easy when it came to leaks, civilian casualties and the PR side of warfare. To put it at its crudest, the imperial Roman legions would go off to conquer some bit of foreign territory, they would do it any way they could and come back home and boast about it. Not many people in Rome knew or cared about war crimes. It was winning that mattered. Of course, it looked different from the barbarian point of view, but the barbarians got very little chance to put their point of view at Rome.

But even in the ancient world, it wasn't quite so simple. Many modern observers of the column of Marcus Aurelius
(the ‘other', less famous column still standing in the centre of the city) have wondered just how ‘subversive' were the scenes of Roman violence depicted. The theme is Marcus Aurelius' campaigns against the Germans. There is much more here than on Trajan's column of (for example) women and children getting abducted or slaughtered. Was this all celebratory? Or was there at least a strand here of displaying (even if not directly questioning) the very nasty side of Roman conquest?

And as for leaks, the problems of communication in the ancient world meant that there were leaks and rumours aplenty. This is one of the things that struck me most when I was researching my book
The Roman Triumph
. I discovered that the senate often said to a general returning home and wanting a triumphal procession that they would wait and interview some of the (Roman) eye-witnesses before deciding on whether the victory deserved such an honour. The most extraordinary rumour I came across concerned a victory scored by Cassius Longinus (who went on to be one of the assassins of Julius Caesar). He claimed to have repelled an invasion of Parthians into Syria. Had he? One rumour circulating in Rome was that they weren't Parthians at all but Arabs dressed up as Parthians. (A bit like us saying that they weren't the Taliban but a load of Kurds dressed up as Taliban.)

And civilian losses could be controversial too.

Of course, what counted as ‘civilians' could have been rather different in antiquity. In a sense, given the nature of ancient military service, all adult males counted as soldiers – so civilians were the women and children. Which of these, and exactly how many, should be a casualty of war was famously debated by the Athenians in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. After they had put down a revolt in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, they at first decided to kill all the
male citizens and enslave all the women and children. But the next day they debated the question again and took a different view (admittedly on grounds of expediency rather than compassion) and decided to execute only the ringleaders of the revolt.

All the same, the ancient military machine didn't have to face leaks on the scale we have just seen about Afghanistan. And a depressing set of documents it seems to be. Never mind the big things that will come out of this new material; most of us who have ever raised issues about civilian casualties and read all those blanket denials will feel pretty angry to discover that at least some of those denials appear to have been lies. And in this country, whenever you question the behaviour of the NATO troops in Afghanistan, you get the ‘Wootton Bassett' card thrown at you … the ‘How could you insult our boys?'

Well, it turns out that some of our boys' bullets (and other NATO nations' boys' bullets) have killed more civilians than was ever let on.

But it is more complicated than that, and certainly not a question of deploring the behaviour of individual soldiers. The real culprits are those political leaders who convinced us that you could fight an Afghan guerrilla war without hurting the innocent as well as the ‘guilty'; those who strongly implied (even if they didn't quite say) that modern warfare could be surgical and indeed, successfully conducted, could win the hearts and minds of the decent Afghan people.

Dream on. The Romans were at least more realistic about war always being very nasty indeed.

The style guide of the
Guardian
newspaper has this entry: ′innocent civilians: the adjective is superfluous′

MICHAEL BULLEY

Weren′t Marcus Aurelius′ campaigns against the Germans defensive rather than offensive?

I thought that huge waves of German and Samatian tribes were making serious incursions into Roman provinces, looting, burning and killing, and the Romans were somewhat desperately straining every resource to repel them.

MARKS

Given that the Taleban (which is Arabic for ′students′, by the way) are by definition not members of the armed forces of a state, the word ′non-combatant′ would be better. This is not the
Guardian
anyway!

GEOFFREY WALKER

Taliban is a Persian plural formation of ′talib′, the Arabic plural being ′tullab′ or ′talaba′. Arabic ′taliban′ would be the dual form: ′two students'. If only.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

11 September 2010

I woke up this morning to a great item on the
Today
programme by my colleague Mark Goldie, about the cemetery 100 yards or so up the road from our house, ‘Ascension Burial Ground'.

I first went there about 25 years ago, looking for the grave of James Frazer, on whom I was then working (with his fantastic, obsessive anal archive, compiled largely, I suspect, by Lady Frazer and now in the care of Trinity College – on which more in a minute). And have wandered up, every now and then, ever since, doing what my mother used to call ‘churchyard creeping' and finding the memorials of the long-lost dons. It's a great place for a Sunday stroll … and if I had to spend eternity
somewhere, it would be my place of choice. (I expect a plot is rather expensive.)

Mark obviously shares my enthusiasm for the Burial Ground, its slightly ‘overgrown-ness', its motley crowd of occupants, the striking contrasts and the hints of living character. (As you would expect, that dandy, Sir Richard Jebb's – late nineteenth-century Professor of Greek – monument is a very grand creation.) But he carefully drew a veil over some of the more curious politics, and other weirdnesses, of the place.

Take Wittgenstein's grave (above).

It is, as Mark pointed out, very plain: a simple slab, with just his name and date. Mark put this down to the man himself, his refusal to utter in death as in life anything beyond the verifiable.

Yes, it certainly seems appropriate to the man. But there are other, less noble factors at work here too. Wittgenstein's memorial is actually a pretty close match for that of Sir James and Lady Frazer (who you would expect to have something a bit more showy – Frazer was a real celeb by the 1930s). The secret is that both these slabs must have been commissioned by Trinity College on the cheap. (Rich colleges in Cambridge may look after archives very nicely, but they don't throw their money around on slabs.) Wittgenstein died without heirs, and the Frazers died within a day of each other and without kids – so in both cases it fell to Trinity to handle the funeral and the grave. The fact that it fitted nicely with Wittgenstein's character was a happy coincidence.

But Wittgenstein's grave is even more curious than that. For a start, it attracts a regular series of offerings and tributes. The last time I went, there was a little ladder on it (after his famous metaphor, I suppose) and an assortment of drooping flowers.

There is also a politics of proximity. If one is thinking of eternity, it might seem important to be next to a friend rather than a rival or enemy. And that's exactly what Wittgenstein's pupil Elizabeth Anscombe must have thought. For how else, apart from buying the next-door plot, did she end up in death at Wittgenstein's feet? Even defying the boundaries of religion – for she was a Catholic after all.