Thanks Kieran – the photo must have been mislabelled. Will rectify.
Aoife

Probably confusion over St.Patricks being the “Kilkenny campus” for NUIM.

How would students, who by definition are learning about their subjects – the vast majority only at the beginning of that process – be able to tell objectively what in the university system would serve them best in the long term?

Speaking as someone who’s been on both sides of that divide and spent a long time in industry as well, I don’t believe undergraduate students in general have as firm a grasp on their actual needs and requirements as they might believe. I know I certainly didn’t, and I wasn’t exactly ignoring the topic at the time.

As to the multiple, for me it was between two and three, depending on the specific lecture. In a few cases it rose to five or six. And that’s just lectures; it doesn’t include practical lab work, assignments or exams.

I challenge you to prepare a 50 minute lecture on any topic of your choice then come back and tell us how long it took you..a lot more than 25 minutes no doubt.

And to add to that challange, we’ll evaluate how well you did from the feedback of a group of about 200 18-year-olds who are stuck in an underventilated lecture room designed for a much smaller group of students, less than 100 yards from the nearest open pub on a warm sunny friday afternoon.

Oh, and lets up the ante a bit more and say that they’re in training for their professional careers in (say) IT, where you must teach them the fundamentals of the profession in a way that means their degree won’t be obsolete inside of four years after graduation, while the companies in that field all publicly demand that the students be taught whatever specific toolset those individual companies are using (and they’re all different, and none of them are really suited to teaching basic principles well).

In other words, you can either teach the basics well and be slated for being out of touch with industry; or you can teach the latest fad and be slated for producing students nobody in the IT industry can hire (does that ring any bells for anyone?).

Imagine having some time off on a Friday to enjoy life? Imagine actually not working every day for 60 years and then just dying from boredom? Imagine being a secondary teacher and having the whole summer off and how horrible that is for everyone else. Or imagine a society where everyone had those benefits, wouldn’t that be nice….

@martin. Why didn’t you become a teacher? It sounds like heaven.

Well it’s not even true in a lot of cases. Most newly qualified teachers earn so little that they need to supplement their income by working during the summer. And I work in the public sector. I’m one of those people. Sponging off the state and laughing at private sector workers. Lazy too. And fat. And lazy.

You do realise that not every lecture can be repeated the following year, right?
Or that the majority of those in some fields (like IT) get changed every single year because the field moves so fast?
Or that at MSc level, virtually all lectures fall into the one-use-only category?

Or that virtually nobody giving lectures in university in Ireland today is *only* hired to lecture? That in fact almost all of them are hired for research, and the lecturing is something they are expected to do on top of that job, and that if the research slips, they don’t get rehired?

I think maybe you don’t really understand the job you’re slating, at all.