The History Man: A Novel by Malcolm Bradbury
Author:Malcolm Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Classics, Humour, Fiction
ISBN: 9781504007764
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1975-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
VIII
The seminar room where Howard meets this weekly class, Socsci 4.17, is an interior room without windows, lit by artificial light. The room is a small one; on three of its walls are pinned large charts, illustrating global poverty, while the fourth wall is occupied by a large green chalkboard, on which someone has written, as people are always writing, âWorkers uniteâ. The room contains a number of tables with gunmetal legs and bright yellow tops; these have been pushed together in the centre to form one large table, where some previous tutor has been holding a formal class. In the room stand three students, positioned somewhere indeterminate between the tables and the walls; it does not do, at Watermouth, to take it for granted that a room arrangement that suits one teacher will ever suit another. Classes at Watermouth are not simply occasions for the one-directional transmission of knowledge; no, they are events, moments of communal interaction, or, like Howardâs party, happenings. There are students from Watermouth who, visiting some other university, where traditional teaching prevails, stare in amazement, as if confronted by some remarkable and exciting innovation; their classes are not like that. For Watermouth does not only educate its students; it teaches its teachers. Teams of educational specialists, psychologists, experts in group dynamics, haunt the place; they film seminars, and discuss them, and, unimpressed by anything as thin as a manifestation of pure intellectual distinction, demonstrate how student C has got through the class without speaking, or student F is expressing boredom by picking his nose, or student H has never, during an hour-long class, had eye-contact with the teacher once. They have sample classes, where the faculty teach each other, sessions in which permanent enmities are founded, and clothes get torn, and elderly professors of international reputation burst into tears. So Howard comes into the room, and he looks around it, and he inspects the arrangement of the tables. âIâm afraid this is what Goffman would call a bad eye-to-eye ecological huddle,â he says. âWe donât want these tables here like this, do we?â
âNo, Dr Kirk,â says one of the students standing in the room, a big-boned girl named Merion Scoule, in a nervous way. Watermouth makes students nervous; you never know quite what to expect. There are classes where you have, on arrival, to eat something, or touch each other, or recount last nightâs dreams, or undress, in order to induce that strange secular community that is, in Watermouth terms, the essence of a good class, a class that is interesting. There are others where you have to sit and listen to tutors in self-therapy, talking about their problems or their wives or their need to relate; there are other classes where almost the reverse happens, and the students become objects of therapy, problem-bearers, and where an apparently casual remark about oneâs schoolboy stamp collection, or a literary reference to the metaphoric significance of colour, will lead to a sudden psychic foray from a teacher
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire by J.K. Rowling(3592)
Never by Ken Follett(3500)
Machine Learning at Scale with H2O by Gregory Keys | David Whiting(3495)
Unfinished: A Memoir by Priyanka Chopra Jonas(3182)
Fairy Tale by Stephen King(2888)
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman(2787)
Will by Will Smith(2553)
Rationality by Steven Pinker(2131)
The Storyteller by Dave Grohl(2048)
The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly(2021)
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow(1995)
Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds - Clean Edition by David Goggins(1976)
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry(1964)
It Starts With Us (It Ends with Us #2) by Colleen Hoover(1944)
The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom(1924)
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr(1891)
The Becoming by Nora Roberts(1880)
New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional by Paul David Tripp(1801)
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson(1769)
