Another tweet-and-a-half and no more, instead of a longer post.

Rosemary Roberts once described nursery as “plenty of interesting things to do and plenty of people to do them with,” if I recall her correctly. And here we are at the tail end of summer, working frantically (this brief post is by way of respite!) to make sure that Monday goes as smoothly as possible.

University: interesting things to study and people to study with. Monday: enrolment and induction.

Talks are organised, classes (for some postgrads) set up, their photocopying done: all that is in place. So what else is there? How do we ensure that people joining us feel “held” (to use the phrase a credit-entry year three student used last year)?

What are the messages from nursery?
Is there nothing like milk and cookies and a rest?

Well, there are and there aren’t.

I think the key is that staff understand what transition is. They get the importance of the rite of passage, and the dominance of the institution. They know your change into a student on this course or that is a reinvention, at one level, and that this may not be instant – maybe that it should not be instant.

A concept of transition trajectories lets us acknowledge that successful transitions may take time, that children [read: students] deal differently with transitions and that prior experience needs to be take into account.

Janet Moyles: Beginning Teaching, Beginning Learning

University can be an institution larger and more impersonal than you may be used to – but it is staffed by real people, who are contactable, people with whom you can communicate, who care (dare I say it?) about you and your learning.

Next week will bewilder and alienate, just as it does when you are two and go into a massive room full of busy, bigger children and adults you don’t know. Do what one of my granddaughters did this week just gone: find something to do that you like, make sure you can find coffee and books and a computer, or someone who looks like they will be OK.  Attachments are important; place is important; activity is important. Transitions are key: just remember amid the forms and room changes and institutional hiccups that your tutors know this and are there to support you.

Four years ago I speculated on graduation from the point of view of the rising trend of graduation for young children, which to my mind confuses progression and graduation. This too makes for a good read, although from a different angle.

But a number of issues around students not able to graduate (because they have not fulfilled the requirements of the programme or because they have not turned up) lead to me look again at just what is graduation. At Brookes, for example, there exists a persistent myth embedded in the language of the ceremony about whether you are a BA (or whatever) without the ceremony – in other words, is our ceremony a conferment of degrees? This leads me to wonder about really what comes down to two themes:

What if we look at the language of the ceremony? Are we really addressing graduands who become graduates?

What about the ritual? What is conferred, what is received? Is there a quasi-sacramental element here?

In other words, is it possible to look at a graduation ceremony through the eyes of a liturgist?

This is what I asked last year when I recorded my trepidation about marks, especially for final-semester students who were due to graduate. It seemed a huge responsibility, and still does.

This year I am ploughing through the first years’ work (“Early Years in the UK Context”) before I start on my second and third years’ assignments (“Young Children’s Spirituality” and “Becoming a Reader,” the “Independent Studies” in Early Childhood and Education), and feeling much the same. It may be a slog – a long list of students from  one module – but each has to be given attention, each has to be read with interest. This year, however, it has an added sharpness. This is the first year that these marks “count” towards their final degree using a Brookes home-grown version of Grade Point Average. It feels very different from the diagnostic stuff of Level 4 in the past, not because I am pressured into giving different marks – that’s not an issue – but because I am more conscious than ever how far these students have to go in their writing and reading skills.

Consider this part of a paragraph (from a previous essay, now anonymised but not otherwise edited):

I have decided to focus on the two aspects of the curriculum the first being when children are supposed to start school and the second being assessment as I believe that these are two of the differences that I found interesting when comparing both curriculums. In some respects the two curriculums are quite similar however one of the most interesting differences is that English children start serious education at 5 and Welsh children start at 7. Denmark, Greece and Hungary and Finland. These places that start later focus on the children into the people they become.

No amount of in text comments such as “Not a sentence” or “What does ‘serious education’ mean?” will do much to support the long journey to fluency as a writer. What is  needed is a revision of the expectations of school, and the expectations of tutors and students about the first year at University. I want to create more opportunities for this learning to take place, for assessment that genuinely supports students’ “learning journeys.” I want good writing to be a habit, when being caught out for failure of grammar is too often  an occupational hazard.

No, it’s not a moan about “schools these days,” or a plea to go down the line that says that harder exams make better learning as in the current debate around calculators, but just a thought: at what point do we really get to teach children and young people how to write?

An informative blog post from Ian McCormick in praise and dispraise of “said” prompts a quick thought from me today on the word “highlight.”

If you (or one, or I, and change the verb accordingly) use “highlight” it ought to mean what it says. A highlighter helps the reader understand by emphasising certain elements, for example. However, Humpty-Dumpty-like, we (you, one, I &c., &c) try and make a word mean what we want it to mean; we often misuse “highlight” as if it means “This is an interesting idea from [writer A] and s/he says…” It’s got two syllables and is something to do with presenting an argument. It’ll do.

But Ian’s thoughts on “said” made me think about the real words we need. Brookes’ ever-useful Upgrade service is on hand with all sorts of links on academic writing, such as this, Manchester’s Academic Phrasebank.  I’d just like to add my own thoughts here.

When we write “highlights” we might mean any number of different things, but chatting to “my” students on Becoming a Reader this week as part of their feedback session brought to mind the idea that what we often intend is simply a richer way to put “writes.” Here, then, in no special order are some I think may be preferable in this sort of context.

argues
suggests
claims
discusses
explores
surveys
explains
makes the point that
asserts
states
maintains

Health warning to students: Use a dictionary to make sure it’s the right word, and remember: a thesaurus is not a dictionary. These words all have their uses; they just may not all be exact synonyms.

I’m not explaining what a synonym is – not now, at any rate.