Choosing a UK university

Sod the league tables - look at the social life as seen on the Students Union websites! Essex gets off to quite a promising start with some obviously "skool" based entertainment...

But evidently they're not the only ones, and this looks like my kindof place... And then, at the last moment, in comes Northumbria University. Hmmm!

Are students a waste of space?

There's plenty of people who think so. After all, they cost the rest of us a lot of money, they don't study they miss more classes than they attend, do the bare minimum of work, and they're noisy and drunk most of the time. If that's your viewpoint, you'll probably be as pleased as I was to see one university has now found a use for students. Would that every university offered such a facility.

Real life

I've made reference a few times to the fact that I went to schools in the UK that used corporal punishment before it was banned. Even so it was curiously difficult to really know everything that went on because the most serious punishment were always in private and those on the receiving end were usually reluctant to discuss it. There were lots of beliefs that built up that may have been completely true or just urban myths. One I was always curious about was that it was widely suggested that if you were given three detentions in one term you would automatically get sent to the Deputy Head for a caning. I have no idea whether it was true - I certainly can't recall any teacher every saying it and I never heard of a case where it happened. But it seemed to make sense and most of us believed it. I'd love to know if anyone else went to a school with such a rule. If it did happen at my school then the timing of the caning didn't have any connection with the timing of the detention. I think if I'd been the Deputy Head I'd have wanted to have such a rule but I'd have wanted to have linked the caning to the third detention - either making the miscreant take the caning and then sit in silent discomfort for the duration of the detention without the opportunity to rub it or rush to the loo to look at the marks, or perhaps even more effective to tell them at the start of the detention that they would be caned at the end so they had to sit there with nothing to distract them from thinking about what was to come.