8.00 am. I’m walking and siting with the delicacy of a ballerina, having wrenched the muscles of my lower back over the weekend while convalescing with my cold. Today, the cold has eased partially, but the back pain persists. I shall proceed until circumstances advise me to stop. The medication is causing moderate (and rather pleasant) symptoms of derealisation. 8.30 am. Off to School for a morning of personal tutorials. 9.00 am. The tutorials began. I was keen to impress upon them that our discussion would be non-judgemental. The meeting was not about academic assessment but, rather, an opportunity to review — openly and without prejudice — their apprehension of personal attainment:

Some principles and observations that emerged from our conversations:

• Secondary schools no longer prepare students for essay writing. School pupils rarely have the opportunity to write more than paragraph-long responses to questions, or reports at best, before they begin higher education (which is now not so high as it used to be, because its staff are having to laid foundations that, a decade ago, the schools would have been responsible for.)
• Fine Art students often struggle with essays due to a lack of a prolonged and consistent application to the discipline. They make images on a daily basis, but essays are written only when a deadline demands it. Some form of writing needs to be routine.
• For some students, the first year experience was a rough passage between the two harbours: the one, of secondary school, the other, of university … with attendant seasickness. Adapting to an entirely different educational culture makes considerable demands on them.
• Some students avoid taking art history modules (even those they’re passionate about) which have examinations as one of the assessment components.
• Cumulative stress is a problem for some students (as I suspect it is for us all on occasion). It strikes in the final third of the semester, when time is short and assessment looms.

2.10 pm. Abstraction, lecture 5:

3.10 pm. Adminy things: uploads, registers, file conversion, and so forth. 4.00 pm. I continued with personal tutorials. 4.45 pm. A spot of disentanglement was in order; one of life’s familiar but nonetheless potent visual metaphors:

6.30 pm. A little horizontal elevation to ease my back and recuperate before the evening shift. 7.30 pm. The evening shift. I finalised the handout for the field study and some preparation for tomorrow’s Vocational Practice class, and reconfigured the module’s file folders. My cold persists; ears are full; brain fizzes; even concentration requires concentration. A somewhat earlier night is called for.