It’s gone ten o’clock. It’s dark outside. You can hear screams of laughter as friends head out for a fun-filled night.
And where are you? Stuck in front of your laptop reading an essay for the hundredth time and finding yet another reference that you didn’t write down, having to sift back through the Star Catalogue to find it.
Sound familiar? Well, it’s the same for our poor, tired lecturers.
After a hectic day in the library, they get home and are stuck in their leather-backed office chair all night.
With just a cup of tea for company, they have to plough through essay upon essay on the same subject from behind their gold-rimmed, perfectly-mounted spectacles.
You can only imagine their frustration when the opening titles to University Challenge chime away on the television, crestfallen that they can’t go and watch it.
But never fear. Our academic stewards have a stress-release technique up their sleeve. Just like we might glide the mouse over to the Facebook window, they slide their cursor over to MUSE to send a quick email to their clever online buddies.
‘Look what someone wrote. Fancy putting that down!’
Then again, I think I’d be depressed reading variant versions of my essay two hundred times over.
But should it be the case that they get to make fun of the hours we spend shut away in our rooms, drastically changing and altering words on a page?
I remember when my second-ever assessment was returned to me and my tutor said: “You obviously got complacent with your first mark and got sloppy.”
He didn’t even know me so how could he say I was complacent?
Maybe all this is part of a lecturers’ movement to take a stand against us; a final uprising to every single embarrassment they have ever experienced from us as students, no matter how small or insignificant.
Whether it was slipping a joke that they’d spent hours trying to come up with into a lecture only to receive blank looks and an awkward silence, or being subject to sniggers as their evident lack of technological knowledge was illustrated in their failure to combat the use of PowerPoint or the projector.
Either way, maybe the time has come for lecturers and teachers – even those supply teachers back at school that you took advantage of – to stand up straight and fight back.
These lecturers won’t be walked over any longer. They will get laughs with their well researched and constructed jokes, and they won’t get laughed at over their struggle to get the computer to work.
We students don’t miss a chance to have a good laugh when something goes wrong – a necessary expulsion of the stress and strains of student life – but we do appreciate quality teaching.
Despite our moans and groans over how much work we’ve got piling up and the limited amount of time we have to enjoy ourselves, we do respond to good lectures and helpful tutors.
When you’ve spent a long time on an assessment, it’s hurtful to think your lecturer is making sneaky comments on behind your back.
But you’ve got to admit, the thought of sitting in a high-backed office chair with piles of unmarked student papers next to a mug of Earl Grey and an empty packet of Werther’s Original is a frightful one.