Annoying, I agree, but not necessarily insurmountable. I take it the box has at least one SCART socket. If it has two, you can easily take the audio from that (SCART to phono adaptors are pretty cheap, and readily obtained). If there is but one SCART socket, just connect a SCART splitter box to it and take your audio feed via that.

No, I'd say he was higher than a treble 

And now heard a 12 year-old girl, mezzo or more likely contralto. Wonderful.

And the string quartet DID peform Karl Jenkin's funny string work!

Thanks for this, Bryn.  There are two SCART sockets, so I'll get myself a SCART to phono adaptor - in time for next week's showing on BBC4.

Grumpy today because of having been given wrong information about buses from Oslo to Oslo Torp airport (which is miles away from Oslo city centre, two hours drive), and so have to hang around for about 7 hours at the airport for the later flight. Still, at least there's free internet access and a power supply - gives some respite from the mountain of essays I'm marking at the moment!

Rant for today is about the really poor standard of English you find from today's undergraduates (at least at some of the places I've taught at). And about trendy educational systems that somehow don't think learning is that important.

Turning into a real Grumpy Old Man here.....

Well, by the time I've finished one batch this week, I will have marked about 80 essays, 50 pieces of documentation, and 20 dissertations (around 10 000 words each). And with two big concerts slap bang in the middle as well. It certainly gets a bit much, and rather industrial in terms of the marking. But it has to be done. I try and give very detailed feedback, including on basic issues of style and grammar (and there are many), but that takes an awful lot of time. Various grumps: why oh why oh why will students rely on the notoriously unreliable Wikipedia, with no corroborating sources? It's all right for looking something up informally, and even for forums like this, but not for an academic essay. And why does their internet bibliography (much of which they've clearly stumbled upon by chance) usually exceed the number of books they've consulted, by some margin? And why do they not learn basic principles of how you reference sources in an essay (we give them clear guidelines on this), including the use of 'ibid' in footnotes, the fact that you need to refer to your sources within the body of your main text, the fact that unusual information at the very least needs a footnote, and so on. And why can't they learn the use of a semicolon, rather than constructing these ungrammatical sentences consisting of bits just placed end to end, or even how to use commas properly?

Use of quotes can be bizarre: some, having taken plagiarism warnings a little too extremely, even write 'X was 'born in 1939'[footnote] and he composed this piece 'between 1967 and 1969'[footnote], which is for 'clarinet, horn and trombone'[footnote]' or the like. Others quote unremarkable text verbatim and in quotes, rather than trying to paraphrase it (though the contrast between this and their own writing style can be painfully apparent).

But there are some interesting essays amongst them, and a wider interest in certain things than I'd expected. Documentation of various performance/site-specific projects has been very interesting indeed - extremely pleased when, for example, I find one person locating some of Kagel's work in the context of the theatre of Grotowski and Artaud (with pertinent quotations from either figure). Otherwise, there seems to be a certain median standard that occurs - an awful lot of marks fall in the 60-70 (2:1) range (martle, do you find this as well?).

Some very choice moments: one piece of documentation that was in the form of an envelope containing some onion peelings, a newspaper cutting, and a CD-ROM, and one 10 000 word dissertation all about performance practice in John Cage's 4'33" (for which this student's final performance consisted of three different renditions), all taken very seriously (rightly and done well). And those amusing howlers you get in essays: one of my favourites this year was 'to all intensive purposes'.

OH, AND CAN WE MAKE IT AN EXPELLABLE OFFENCE TO GET ITS AND IT'S MIXED UP?!!!!!!

[EDIT - my earlier comment about trendy educational systems was referring to secondary schools and the teaching there these days, not to higher education]

Your last statement, Ian, gives me the impression that such numbers as 60-70 would have been arrived at by anyone else grading the essays. If anyone has time, I'd be interested whether there's a system or at least a set of guidelines by which you come up with such (percentages?) numbers.

I realize its probably the most frustrating part of your job, but I think every occupation has it's sources of frustration.

Turfers, you're fooling no-one.

 

Turf-guy, we still all (all??) operate a double-marking system whereby two internal examiners have to agree marks (even if the second merely samples the batch) and an external examiner has to overview the marks of each assessment. Most courses have to have explicit 'learning outcomes' and objectives by which a grade can be measured, and often an overall grade is made up of percentage breakdowns of individual qualities (presentation, coherence of argument etc. etc. - although I dislike that approach personally).

Oh. Just seen your last one. Very funny. I was fooled. But I've got ITS blindness now...