Years ago, I was a tutor in a university students’ hall of residence. The warden and his wife discovered that she was pregnant for the second time. Something I knew she was pleased to be. So, I congratulated him. He paused for a moment and then pointed out that I was making a big assumption that HE was pleased. Whether he was or was not, it was a huge lesson to me about making assumptions.
We all do, of course, and I am not convinced that I learnt the lesson fully, but wherever possible, I do try to find out what someone else’s perspective is about something before offering mine. There are exceptions.
I bite my tongue when people tell me that they have another child on the way (yes, it’s about pregnancy again, but the point is that since the seventies, we have known that the planet Earth was struggling to sustain its population (Goldsmith et al., 1972) and today, estimates are that we have as much as 1.7 times the population that Earth can reasonably support. That we now spend more on trying to have babies in the UK than on birth control scares me. Annually, an estimated £68m is spent on in vitro fertilisation (IVF) alone by the NHS, at the same time roughly £79m is spent on family planning prescribing. It seems likely that the two are the same. Getting pregnant and having children is not a right; it is a privilege. Having one is an indulgence; having more is what the economist, Adam Smith, called ‘self-interest’. Psychologists refer to this behaviour as ‘egoism’.
I generally tell people who ask if I am going to do anything special for Christmas, that I’m an atheist. Personally, I regard anyone who believes in unsubstantiated fairy tales as delusional.
Similarly, when asked if I eat meat, I explain that I am almost entirely vegetarian leaning towards veganism. Why? For similar reasons, we know that one of the largest contributions to the climate crisis is the world’s dependence on cattle, chickens, pigs and sheep. Similarly, there wouldn’t be food shortages anywhere in the world if we all switched to a plant-based diet. Above all, though, I choose to eat plant-based food because of the appalling conditions in which animals are ‘farmed’ and slaughtered.
We live within earshot of a playing field and our peace is regularly disturbed by ‘pugulists’ getting rid of their aggression on a small spherical object. It’s quite widely accepted by sociologists that football is a means of social control, adopted in the 1800s as a way of controlling male workers aggression on Sundays. Ever since, periods of social unrest have been swiftly followed by controversy within football. I’m sure that they enjoy the pasttime, but I am saddened that they are so easily manipulated.
So what about the students who seem to think that the world revolves around them and that just because their term has finished and won’t restart until September this means that their tutors have also been enjoying a ‘break’? Well, we don’t. Most tutors earn far less than students realise. In my field (counselling and psychotherapy) we are preparing them for a career where they will typically charge more than double what we earn per hour. We don’t really do ‘breaks’ as it’s the busiest time of year for most tutors, we will be handling recruitment, enrolment and clearing (along with all the queries that come up during that time), course design, updating materials etc, migrating VLE resources to new courses, and marking the various portfolios and similar reports delivered by these students after the term finishes and for which they expect the results within days. As we earn very little (the pay rate hasn’t increased in over a decade due to the Tory government), some of us will be teaching elsewhere, and besides all this the summer is pretty much the only time we have left for research, which we are expected to do (to provide enriching teaching) but are not paid to do! So, yes, most of us get a week or so away but it isn’t the great six-week vacation that most students seem to expect.