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David K's personal
thoughts about
especially for the
MID-SWEDEN UNIVERSITY
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GENERAL IDEAS
In many fields where
I work, I love to just potter around creating this and that
exciting project with no previous thoughts about what will come out
at the end, everyone is valued equally for their unique
contribution to a group, and everyone is amazed and says "I never
imagined I could..."
But things are a bit different when we have to judge
someone else for a university degree... In different schools and
colleges, different tutors may be looking for different things: a
delicious thick Russian sauerkraut pancake won't make a very
favourable impression on a Belgian chef, if he's looking for a sweet
crispy dessert crêpe...
My working idea is that a student can feel secure and function
better if they know what I value when I'm looking at their work:
the more all-sided my attitude is, and the better I express it, the
more chance there is that they can find something there which enables
them to feel "this is what I need to work well and develop"
- Thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson's
idea to "Affect the reader precisely as you
wish" - it needs to be said that there are no absolute
criteria for "good" language, except "did you achieve what
you intended?" Of course if we're educating people, rather
than teaching "English as she is spoke", we want even wider
criteria than that: "did you achieve what you intended? - and what
did you achieve that was more than you intended?"
Jan Helander has expressed some very stimulating ideas about
learning, about what marking and evaluating do and don't do, indeed
about all of life... I've been digesting its Swedish content into
English for a colleague: here you
have a taster, which can be interesting both for what it says,
and to show how a native-speaker works - in this case rather quickly
and without a lot of polishing - with expressing Swedish thoughts in
English...
- Well worth looking at:
- Gowers, Sir Ernest, The complete plain words , latest
ed. 1988
- Fowler, Henry Watson, Dictionary of modern English
usage, 1987
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