Wagwan mandem.

Woah, sorry, I mean hi. How are you all doing. I’m going to assume you’re good like I normally do.

Anyway, the topic of this blog, which has nothing to do with me speaking like a h (I’m so g I’m h, y’know?) but to do with how we ‘speak’ with more than words.

I was inspired to write this blog when I was listening to a song by Boyzone called Words. In the song, Ronan Keating sings ‘It’s only words, and words are all I have, to take your heart away’. This isn’t necessarily true in a number of ways. One is gruesome, and one is potentially linguistically interesting.

I won’t go into detail about the gruesome thing, but rather unsurprisingly I will go into the linguistically interesting thing. Is Ronan telling the truth?

Well, first of all, as I have explained in a previous blog, words do mean lots, so he has a point. However, I don’t think words are that great on their own.

Let’s take the word hello. In itself, hello means, well, hello, you know what it means.

However, if I sing hello with a smile on my face, you will probably assume that I’m happy, either to see you or just in general. If I mumble hello with a frown on my face you’ll probably assume I’m sad in general (I’d never be sad to see you I promise).

Clearly, the fact that I said hello didn’t make you think these things, the way I said hello made you think these things.

Now, back to what Mr Keating had to say. Is it only words I have, to take your heart away?

I don’t like to criticise Ronan too often because he has a wonderful voice and some wonderful songs, but here I feel like I have to (sorry Ronan). I would say to Ronan that quite frankly if he only said words to his lady (or gentleman) love in a monotone voice he would struggle to take her (or his) heart away. What he does have to take her heart away is a combination of things, obviously including words, but also including intonation and facial expressions among other things.

To finish, as I said in a previous blog words do mean lots, but not on their own. On their own they’re pretty rubbish (sorry if you disagree don’t hate me pls), it’s when we combine them with other things that they become truly wonderful. I propose Boyzone’s lyrics be changed to ‘It’s only words and intonation and facial expressions amongst other things, and words and intonation and facial expressions amongst other things are all I have, to take your heart away’.

Peace out homeslices.

Sorry, I mean thank you and goodnight. I really need to stop doing that.

Language is beautiful. It is a tool to express the deepest of emotions. It is a platform for creativity. It is used for sonnets, life-changing speeches and elegantly powerful declarations of love, wrath and passion. It has the ability to corrupt lives and empower voices. It is a continuously developing phenomenon which has managed to fascinate mankind for centuries.

It’s also pretty hilarious when things go a bit wrong.

We’ve all seen badly translated instructions and grammatically awkward shops signs, but when you get a firsthand experience of these ‘funny errors’, it’s especially amusing.

While studying Japanese for two years at college, I came across rather a few spelling mistakes and quirky pronunciations. My Japanese teacher, Chieko Sensei, was a fabulous little woman; she was a great teacher and great laugh. However, where our languages differed, sometimes situations arose where it was hard not to giggle uncontrollably.

Every week we were given vocabulary sheets. One week focused on technology lexicon, and we came across the odd word ‘Crick’. It was only when we saw ‘Double Crick’ that we realised it was, in fact, a hilarious mistake.

As Japanese doesn’t contain the [r] or [l] sounds that English does, but more of a mixture of the two to our British ears, this R-L muddle was quite a common occurrence in our lessons, but always managed to brighten our days with Chieko.

Other chuckle-worthy moments included alternative vowel sounds such ‘tooth brash’ and our ‘homework trucking sheet’ (rather than tracking).

But, as another example of the R-L muddle, the moment our childish laughter took over was the time Chieko decided to bring up politics, and have a discussion about David Cameron and the ‘erections’.

But while we can all have a little giggle at these ‘funny errors’, it’s also possible to see them in a different light.

Perhaps another view is to see them as indicators of how diverse separate languages are. The world contains a wonderfully assorted array of languages, scripts and sounds, and when there’s an overlap of two separate languages, they sometimes collide in the most awkward and humorous of ways.

It’s only when these varied languages come together, that we get a little burst of charming hilarity.

Hello again, how are we all? I hope the answer to that question is “good”, otherwise I’ll feel major awks.

Anyway, today I started a module called Writing for Stage, Radio and Screen. As you may have guessed, this isn’t a linguistics module, but a media one. I chose it as one of my options, and judging by the first lecture and seminar, it’s going to be great. The point is, I’m with a group of people consisting largely of individuals I’ve never had the good/bad fortune of speaking to.

These days, I’m fine with situations like this, I’m comfortable talking to new people and I’m fairly confident that I won’t say something ridiculously embarrassing and give off an undesirable first impression. Back in the day though, I wasn’t confident talking to new people, particularly if these people were of the female variety.

Back when I wasn’t a very confident guy and quite frankly looked like, and came across as, a bit of a numpty, I really hated any situations which weren’t completely familiar to me. I wouldn’t like working with a new group at school, I wouldn’t like doing anything on my own in case people thought I was a ‘loser’, and most ridiculously I wouldn’t like any situation, as explained above, where I had to talk to that most alien of species, the ‘female’. I would wonder why I couldn’t say what was actually in my head and why what came out of my mouth was usually along the lines of “hi, ulgifgcbllauidfvm”

If you know me now you’ll probably not believe that I was like that (at least I would hope you wouldn’t), but I was. Of course, it was silly, I blew most situations way out of proportion. I made it even harder than it already was to be at ease in these situations, and I somehow managed to build up a fear of almost EVERY situation where I had to speak. Again, most severely, with the ladies.

All of this meant that I never really tried new things at school, I never really branched out and did things that I wanted to. Some would say I just drifted along for a large part of my life. All of this, because I was scared of saying what I wanted to do, and I was scared of talking to new people and embarrassing myself. Obviously, eventually I got frustrated with this and decided, y’know what, I really ought to get better at speaking to people.

So I did, I went out and got a job, I took the A-Levels I wanted to do, and not what my friends were doing, and gradually became more confident, and blossomed into the beautiful social butterfly I am today. I even love making a fool of myself now.

I like to think that now, I’m not a shy, reserved guy, but much more confident (not arrogant, that would be bad) and at ease with myself, I’ll go out on my own without giving a poo what people think, and I don’t have this weird idea in my head that girls are somehow a completely different species (although sometimes it seems that way) and I can talk to them without my irrational fear.

To give you an idea of how long it took for these fears to completely disappear, I had my first ever date two months after my 19th birthday, and I think that proves the saying ‘you have to love yourself before someone else can’ (although I am currently available, hi).

Sorry if I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent and completely off topic, but I hope the long story has explained the title and explained my thoughts. It’s strange how we can become so afraid of doing something completely natural (using language/talking) because of how we feel in ourselves, and it’s strange how the reservations resulting from this can have such a large impact on our lives (and stop us having dates til the age of 19). I guess (finally, you may think) the point is that language use and self-confidence are very closely related, and have a large impact on one another, and when I realised this, I managed to become much better at using language, and at self-confidence.

Cheers again for reading, have a wonderful afternoon! (PS This was me)

I have issues with how technology is changing the way we communicate. Self- service machines at supermarkets are time efficient, but they’re stopping the customer to cashier chat. TfL want to close manned ticket stations as a way of “modernisation” which is just taking away another opportunity to talk to someone. Telephone customer services are a series of pre-recorded messages navigated by pressing various numbers on the keypad where you end up getting fed up and hanging up, being directed to the website or waiting until you’ve exhausted all of the possible pre-recorded messages to eventually get to a real person! (Because the company are trying their best to keep you away from talking to a person so they don’t have to employ them and pay them).

All of these, and more, really bug me! For someone like my grandma, sometimes getting on the tube or going to the supermarket could be her only chance of talking to another person. How can she do that if everything is run by touch-screen machines? (Something she doesn’t even know how to use.) Firstly, where are the people to help her use them? Secondly, why have someone help her use them when there could just be people to TALK to in the first place to top up her Oyster card or pay for her shopping.

I would say that “modernisation” is normally considered a good thing; it’s synonymous with “advancing”. But it seems as though, according to TfL, “modernisation” means “not talking to people”. So how can taking away manned ticket machines be a good thing if it’s stopping people from communicating with each other? Are they saying that the future is not talking to each other face to face? (Mostly as a way of saving money). This doesn’t appear to be advancement at all.

Sometimes the chat with the cashier at the supermarket can be awkward, but sometimes you can have a really good chat for a few minutes and you’ll leave with a smile on your face. How am I supposed to tell the pre-recorded messages at Southern Electric that I want to DISCUSS payment options or TALK ABOUT how the bills work? How is a confused tourist who has never been on the tube before supposed to navigate their way without being able to TALK to someone? A computer can only do so much. They can’t predict every possible query or problem someone might have. And, God forbid, someone wanted to say “good morning” or have a little chat with the tube worker or cashier as they go about their business and daily life.

I think we’re setting a very bad example to children and people from other countries. Technology is not encouraging children to communicate and build relationships. Technology is not advertising a friendly culture to people from other countries. Technology is no longer being used to make life easier for us, but to make us cheap and uncommunicative.

Comments and alternate opinions welcome!

The future is a strange and exciting place to be living. As a boy I devoured every bit of science fiction libraries and bookshops had to offer and from a young age had my eyes firmly set on the horizon of human possibility. Whilst I dreamed of growing up into a world of flying cars, interplanetary travel and talking computers, I hadn’t really expected things to turn out like that for me – to my mind they were things our distant descendants would develop. So, it’s come as a bit of a surprise to me, and many I think, that we’ve managed to gatecrash our way into bits of that future well ahead of schedule. More bemusingly we’ve managed to skip a lot of what seemed the obvious, useful stuff and developed technologies at a huge tangent to our apparent, pragmatic needs. We’re still living in crumbling Victorian housing stock and still getting about in clunky, fume-belching vehicles that run by exploding rotted corpses. However, we now all have hand held computers that allow us to effortlessly communicate with anyone on any part of the planet.

To put this into context, back in the 1960’s & 1970’s, Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek had predicted leggings, onesies, tablets, mobile phones, and spaceships all having developed at the same time.  Which is to say, the expectation was that it would take humans as long to invent a one cm thick, touch screen computer that could respond to voice commands as it would figure out how to build an engine that’d allow you to travel faster than light. Back then rocketry was moving on in leaps and bounds: We’d gone from launching projectiles blindly across Europe to travelling to the moon in a couple of decades, whereas in comparison a 1 kilobyte computer (4 billion times LESS memory than the most basic iPod) was essentially a building full of valves manned by a team of engineers and technicians. Everyone was expecting high tech houses and flying vehicles to be littering our streets, but computers to maybe have shrunk down to a wardrobe size box of LEDs you could put in your front room, perhaps capable of greeting you by your name when you walked in the door and offering you a cup of tea.  I’ve still no idea about the leggings and the onesies, though – I guess the asumption was that people would have stopped caring about personal aesthetics in the far future.

Although it may seem trite to compare the predictions of science fiction writers to the course of human history, what was written as entertainment very often influenced or predicted what then actually happened. From Issac Asimov to William Gibson there is a long and established line of forward-thinking entertainers shaping what our progress became. Yet despite this, many of our ideas on ‘how it would all be’ seemed to wildy miss the mark. The ‘shiny, functional and mechanical’ option went somewhat awry and instead of opting for a heavy-engineering future, we opted for one of thought and communication. Out went the jet cars and the space elevators, and in came the computers.

Perhaps this is unsurprising. We are, after all, primarily very thinky, talkey monkeys, and many of the industrial developments in the latter half of the 20th century were borne of the awful carnage of the 2nd World War. Since then we’ve had more opportunity to explore out of philanthropic interest rather than fear-based necessity. With this has come a greater interest in exploring ourselves – how we think, how we communicate, how we grow. When we’re not ruthlessly exterminating each other we really seem fascinated with communicating. From cracking the human genome to creating the internet, our main interests have become more rooted in ourselves, and hungry as we are to understand the universe in which we live, our attempts at science are coming to realise understanding how we work is central to that: We are the mirror in which we see the universe, and without understanding that we can’t hope to fathom the reflection it casts upon our surface.

So, we live in world where sharing, recording and analysing our thoughts is now possible on a global level. I can write in Germany, be published in England, critiqued in Australia, and then laughed at in America. The boiler doesn’t work in my flat, but this document can translated into Russian and read in Moscow at the click of a button. Whilst this is a trivial example of an amazing process, when applied to genuinely innovative ideas it’s usefulness is near-impossible to quantify. Instead of building flying cars and biodome houses we’ve become very good at communicating. At some point the interest in moving our thoughts around exceeded the interest in moving our bodies around, and so has become our primary science: Machines that aid thought and facilitate communication. And perhaps this is our route to space elevators and talking houses; Perhaps it’s improving our ability to think and communicate that’ll lead us safely into the future, and maybe that’s why we should start with thought and communication, as the future now happens in our lifetime.

Hello again, the blog has been a little, or a lot, inactive recently, so I thought I’d write something while I’m having a little break from assignments. Please don’t worry lecturers, I am well on course to do my work to my usual impeccable standards (lol).

The inspiration for this blog came when I was at Sainsbury’s yesterday. I know, you’re already enthralled, what could happen next?

Well, let me get on to that. I can’t tell you if you keep pressuring me like this.

Seriously, I’m trying to talk.

Thank you. Well, at Sainsbury’s yesterday a few things happened. I was innocently walking down the aisle when someone came rushing the other way. She was going very fast, far too fast for a supermarket. Far too fast. As she walked towards me I thought I wonder what’s in her basket…

… and then it hit me. The basket that is. Naturally, I said sorry.

What was I apologising for? Sorry my still, standing leg hit your recklessly swaying basket that was hurtling dangerously down the aisle, attached to your equally reckless body? I’m not sure I did too much wrong.

Now, I’ve been reliably informed that this is a very British thing to say, and that most of my fellow earthlings would do the correct thing in that situation and be upset with the person who’s basket my stationary leg so painfully hit. But we don’t here, we’re too polite. I don’t know why, that’s not the point of this post, to be honest I’m just after a few cheap laughs (please laugh).

About 15 minutes after basket-gate, another British politeness thing happened. I was at the till paying for my delicious and practical groceries, when the cashier said “that’s 13 pounds and 47 pence please”
“Thank you” I said, giving the money to the cashier, and again saying “thank you” as he took it off me.
“There’s a pound and 53 pence change” he said.
“Thank you” I said
“Thank you” he said
“Thank you” I said, and then left.

I think about one of those thank yous was justified, when I got my change. Other than that, we were just thanking each other for thanks sake (if you read that quickly it sounds rude hehe).

I don’t know why we do it, it’s not one of my areas of expertise, but unlike a lot of people I quite like it, why not be polite for no reason? It’s much better than being rude for no reason.

Thank you (there’s another) and good night.

It’s hard. That much I can tell you just by simply looking at the title. However, before I delve in too deep, maybe I should (and will) give you a brief rundown about how I immersed myself into music journalism.

Since the age of 11, I’ve had an incredibly deep love for the more “alternative” side of music. Bands such as My Chemical Romance – don’t laugh, everyone’s had their Emo phase, and I know you still know all the words to ‘Teenagers’ – and Slipknot gave birth to such a love, and I eagerly waded through the Internet to find more bands and artists that were just as visceral and brutal. Even now, I still embark upon finding the next band that I want to fall in love with.

As I grew up, my love for music deepened. Despite staring longingly at gig posters in Kerrang! and Rocksound, I didn’t actually get to experience my first gig until the age of 16; I went to see Cancer Bats at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, on Friday 29 October 2010 with a couple of friends, complete with other gig-goers dressed up in various forms of zombies – there was even a zombie bride in the mosh-pit!

It was in the same year that I finally jumped into the world of music journalism. As part of my English Language coursework, we were required to write two different styled-pieces and, for one of my pieces, I wrote a review on the then recently-released, self-titled album from Escape the Fate. My excellent English teacher, Elaine, suggested that I actually start my own music blog – she said that reading my review had impressed her greatly, and apparently wouldn’t look out of place in a music magazine!

With this in mind, I set up a small Tumblr blog, reviewing singles, EPs and full-length albums from all manner of bands. I wasn’t sure it was going that entirely well until two things happened that made me incredibly determined to carry on down this path:

1)    I reviewed Mallory Knox’s EP ‘Pilot’. After tweeting this link, their bassist, Sam Douglas, replied and said he really enjoyed reading it. I then saw them perform Upstairs at the Relentless Garage in Islington a few days after; he told me that my review was one of the best he’s ever read!

2)    A band called The Purple Shots tweeted me, asking if I would review their upcoming single, which I did. Upon reading the review, the guys offered me a guest-list spot (my first of many!) for one of their upcoming gigs in Camden, as a way of saying ‘thank you’.

After these events and with encouragement from Elaine, I set about e-mailing various different music websites, asking if they’d be so kind as to take me on as a contributor. The first two websites never got back to me but HevyPetal did; their editor was more than happy to take me on, and thus began a long and fruitful journey into music journalism.

Even now, as a student of the University of Brighton, I still write. Last year alone, I wrote for Bring the Noise, Stencil Mag, Highlight Magazine, Already Heard and New Junk – I was even Assistant Editor for New Junk! And, if you see me falling asleep in a lecture, I promise it’s not because I’ve been drinking the night before; I’m just shattered after travelling to London and back because I went to review another band, and didn’t actually get into bed until gone 1am. (Look, I need my sleep, okay?)

I have faced hardships whilst working in this gruelling world – it can be incredibly bitchy and there are days where I feel my writing is awful, causing me to question why I’m pursuing this path; whilst being Assistant Editor, I sometimes found it difficult to juggle university work, my job and being an editor.

But there are so many opportunities that I’ve experienced that I wouldn’t change for the world. In my first year, I was offered the incredible opportunity to intern at the Kerrang! offices in London for a week, giving me the chance to see how a weekly magazine is put together. On my first day, I got to interview five different bands, all of whom I’ve been to see at gigs and, later on in the week, I had my first ever phone interview with none other than Jeff Hardy, former TNA Wrestling Champion! Again, a massive thanks to Tim for being supportive about me missing a week of university to go gallivanting around London, listening to unreleased albums in Gibson Studios, watching the lead singer of Your Demise strip to only his boxers and a Christmas-themed apron, and cutting up More magazine’s Christmas tree so Architects’ Sam Carter could wear it for a photo-shoot. The whole week is still a huge ‘pinch me’ moment.

I’ve also been incredibly lucky to interview some humble and lovely people in the music industry; my personal favourite was interviewing Tyler ‘Telle’ Smith of The Word Alive at Slam Dunk last year. Since the age of 15, I’ve been a huge fan of The Word Alive and to sit down with their vocalist for ten minutes was incredible!

Anyway, seeing as I’m so nice (and for saying thanks after I’ve been rambling on), I’m going to try and attach a video of my first ever face-to-face interview! It was conducted outside London’s Nambucca venue on Holloway Road and was with Scottish quintet Autumn In Disguise: Autumn In Disguise Interview.

Anyway, if the video works, watch and laugh my friends. I’m off to pretend that I’m Patrick Stump and violently sing, ‘Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down’. (Sorry to my flatmates.)

Hello again, it’s me. I hope you’ve all had wonderful Christmases and didn’t eat too many foods or drink too many alcohols (I hope you did really).

Now, I know we’re in exam season (do we call it that?) and writing a blog might seem like a crazy idea, but last night I watched an episode of Ricky Gervais’s Derek (which I would highly recommend) and there was a quote which stuck with me and made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

I’d just like to say, Jelena, Tim, Sandra… I am doing work, promise.

Anywho: ‘“She said ‘Kindness is magic, Derek. It’s more important to be kind than clever or good looking.’ I’m not clever or good looking but I’m kind,” is the quote. It helps if I explain a bit about the character of Derek. Derek is a care home worker with an unknown learning difficulty who always sees the best in everything, the world, people, etc. and the person that told him that kindness is magic is a recently deceased care home resident.

Now, this got me thinking about language (naturally). I thought about how these strange noises we make can have such an impact on people. The above quote from Derek was heart warming and had me on the verge of tears (I don’t cry, pfft) because of it’s sincerity and innocence. It made me think about how I am. I like to think I’m a kind person, to me the best feelings in life are making people laugh or smile, and whenever I do something that makes people laugh/smile it makes me feel good, and making people laugh is what I want to do with my life.

My point, though, is that it’s the words that Derek spoke that made me think of all those things.

In life there are loads of situations in which words make us think of past experiences, good or bad, or the daunting, nerve-wracking but ever so exciting future. This can be in the simple form of spoken words, and quite often in things like songs or poetry. A lot of you will be able to think of words, phrases and songs that take you back to a certain memory or a certain place, maybe even a certain someone. A lot of you will also have words, phrases or songs that make you think of the future, love, marriage, career and all the other things that might come along. Even the words I’ve written there might scare you or excite you, I know they do me.

Words also make us think of ideas, concepts.

I suppose the best word to use to explain this is love. What is it? I’m sure I don’t know, I love football, I love my family, I love Daim bars. It seems love means a lot of things, you could probably break it down (I can’t be bothered right now).

I said I’m sure I don’t know what love is, but actually, I’m sure I do. I probably can’t tell you in words, but if I ever consider you worth it, I’ll probably show you (not in that way you dirty so and so). I try to show my friends and family what love is to me by what I do when I’m with them, and indeed when I’m not. I show football I love it by watching and playing it, and I show Daim bars I love them by eating them. There’s different ways of showing different kinds of love. I don’t think my family would approve of me eating them to show them I love them, and I don’t think Daim bars would appreciate being watched or played (I don’t know how you play them).

Again, I’ve gone on a bit of a mad one, but that’s because of what these silly words made me think of, and, as I said in the title, these words mean lots.

Cheers for reading you wonderful people, back to linguistics work I go!

I agree with Tim that the Guardian article said some stupid things about Chomsky. It’s a pity, because in the first half, Harry Ritchie says some excellent things about language and social class (‘Don’t improve your grammar’, Review, 4 January). When he turns to Chomsky, though, his ignorance is equalled only by his arrogance. Only someone who does not know the field could say that Chomsky has dominated linguistics since the late 1950’s. This is hogwash: Chomsky routinely refers to his sub-field as a minority interest. Here’s some evidence: while conferences about generative grammar attract tens of participants, many hundreds of academics flock to conferences about pragmatics or sociolinguistics, where Chomsky gets barely a mention.

More evidence of ignorance: Ritchie refers to ‘transformations’ and ‘deep structures’, apparently unaware that these concepts were abandoned by Chomsky decades ago and superseded by others.

On to the arrogance: Ritchie announces with supreme confidence that Chomsky’s claims about innate programming for language are ‘brilliant but wrong’: ‘recent research’ supposedly proves that ‘children learn language just as they learn all their other skills, by experience’. So according to Ritchie, universal untaught human visual abilities (such as recognising three-dimensional objects) are entirely based on experience, and have nothing to do with the genetically programmed structure of the eyes, the optic nerve, or the visual cortex. And learned skills such as riding a bicycle, which not all humans possess, apparently do not depend at all on an innate human ability to balance our bodies. What nonsense! The assertion that these abilities have no innate element is an absurd dogma, reminiscent of the medieval Church rather than serious discussion. The nature, scope and neurological structure of the innate element of language are matters for research and debate: its existence is not.

If you want to see why Tim (rightly) describes the article as ‘shoddy’, you can read it here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/31/one-way-speak-english-standard-spoken-british-linguistics-chomsky

To see what Chomsky actually says, I recommend Chapter 4 of his book New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. You can read much of it in Google books:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=johr4hURMPgC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

On December 3^rd, the University of Brighton was closed for the whole day following continuous disagreements between lecturers and university employers. Staff and teachers took strike action to raise awareness and fight back against the 13% decrease of pay that had been occurring since 2009. Picket lines formed, a rally took place and lecturers, along with fellow supporters, marched through the town in hope that their terms regarding their contracts, fair pay and equality issues would be met. Their urges for students and public workers to support the action saw much success as the student’s union and many others joined the protest. However, there were still many students who were confused and annoyed after they were refused entry to the libraries and campus facilities. It was clear that many didn’t agree with the strike; instead, they saw a loss of teaching hours, and a direct attack on their education.

But this isn’t how it should have been. It is true that lecturers were primarily concerned with the decline of pay against the rise of living costs and income to the university, but the aim of the strike contained many other terms that staff are continually trying to negotiate with university employers. As well as gender equality pay, lecturers are extremely concerned with the notion that will impact students the most: the privatisation of education. Ross Adamson, a lecturer at the University of Brighton, discussed how this will affect the choices that students take when applying for university; “The thing about privatisation is that it will encourage students to choose subjects which they think will have the most financial return. This, over time, may see fewer students choosing courses within the arts and humanities subjects.”

And it isn’t just the impact this will have on a student’s course choice. Dr Vy Rajapillai agrees with her colleague, but believes it will put students off coming to university altogether; “People who cannot afford the costs, or take on the debt of £9000 a year, are not going to come to university even if they have big ambitions to come here. Instead of going on the basis of who has the merit, it’s going on the basis of who has the money.”

So it’s clear that lecturers and staff weren’t just striking for the sake of themselves; they were also concerned of the welfare of current and future students. So why didn’t the students see it this way?

Toine Hodgkiss is an Architecture student currently studying for his Masters degree. Toine tried to enter the Mouslecoomb campus on the day of the strike, only to be denied access to the library and other facilities when he approached the university. With just two days before one of his assessments was due in, it’s fair to say that his annoyance was fairly reasonable. He had some brief knowledge when asked about his understanding of the strike, but it was clear that he wasn’t aware of all the terms the lecturers and staff were fighting for; “I understood that the strike was based around the tutors’ pay and their demand for an increase.”

But, like many other students, Toine saw the strike only as a loss to his own and his peer’s education; “I didn’t think it was right that I couldn’t access many of the facilities that I would normally be able to. University costs students a lot of money, and it is hard to actually justify the fees for the course I am doing anyway, let alone when I cannot freely access certain facilities due to a strike.”

Toine wasn’t the only student who tried to enter the campus that day, and he certainly wasn’t the only one to disagree with the demonstration. But if one of the main concerns of the lecturers’ strike was for their students, then why were so many students frustrated by it? The only rational answer seems to be, they simply didn’t understand that they were a big part of it.

Instead of supporting the strike like the lecturers had hoped, many students were convinced that it was a pointless exercise that had a detrimental effect on their education. The main communication method that made students aware of the strike appeared to be only leaflets and word of mouth. Some students claimed to not have known about the strike until somebody else mentioned it to them just a few days before it took place. It’s no wonder then, that the students didn’t have any understanding of it, if they didn’t even know it was happening. Perhaps what is needed if there is to be any further action taking place, is more communication between lecturers and students. This way, better opportunities are likely to present themselves within the university for both groups.

Cancellation of lectures is something neither students nor lecturers want. Regardless, if strike action is very likely to be a regular occurrence in the future, there will be even more days where the university is inevitably closed. Although this might be a problem difficult to solve in the near future, it’s important to focus on both the short term and long term impact.

In the short term, there is going to be a negative impact on university life; a few missing lectures can prove to be a struggle within the course for students. However, the right amount of communication and explanation from lecturers can encourage students to support what they are fighting for. After students are made aware of the positive long term impact of strike action, the relationship between teachers and their pupils will be become stronger due to an understanding of each other’s needs.