Rant from a Canary Island

Citation

Hoxley, M. (2006), "Rant from a Canary Island", Structural Survey, Vol. 24 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2006.11024caa.001

Rant from a Canary Island

One way or another I spend a great deal of my time inserting commas and apostrophes into other people’s words – be they contributions to the columns of this journal or, more often, the work of my students. Thus it was with relish that last year I read Lynn Truss’s best seller Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which is a pedant’s guide to punctuation (Truss, 2003). My daughter noticed how much I enjoyed it and for a Christmas present gave me the author’s next book Talk to the Hand (Truss, 2005). Since I spend so much of my working life reading, I tend to only read for pleasure when I am taking time off so I have only got round to reading the next Truss gem recently. The book is a rant against, as the author puts it, “the utter bloody rudeness of everyday life”. Things that particularly irk Truss are call centres, other people’s cigarette smoke, graffiti, drunken youths and misdemeaning cyclists. She lays much of the blame at the door of modern technology including the telephone (particularly the mobile variety), the television, video games and the internet. She concludes her book by making a plea for us all to be more considerate of others as we rush about our daily lives.

Now I haven’t consulted Who’s Who to see how old Truss is, but she confides in her book that she is a child of the 1950s. Also being one of these, I consider myself to be a contemporary of the author’s and she certainly makes many incisive observations in her latest work. I suspect that many younger readers would consider Truss to be rather intolerant, but then tolerance and growing older do not seem to go hand in hand. My elderly Father-in-law used the internet for the first time recently. He had seen a special offer for hotel accommodation that was only available to customers booking on-line. He sat with me in front of the computer screen while I tried to book it for him. Unfortunately the accommodation he desired was not available and he found it very difficult to comprehend that there was not another person sitting in front of a remote computer who he could interrogate about the availability of his hotel room. I have to confess to a lack of tolerance myself recently when I received a call about my telephone service and the caller commenced the conversation with “Good evening Dr Hoxley … ” Nothing untoward about that you might think – apart from the fact that it was late morning. I asked the caller where on earth he was as it certainly wasn’t the evening where I was. I must get at least one unwanted telephone call at home per day. I suppose I should register with the service which attempts to exclude these but I must admit to a certain perverse sense of satisfaction in hanging up on these double glazing, kitchen and telephone service salesmen. I find this nearly as therapeutic as dropping bottles into a bottle bank!

Now I promise that I am getting closer to the salient points of my own rant penned beside a swimming pool in Tenerife. I bumped into an ex-English teacher just after I left private practice to become a lecturer. He was singing the praises of the academic life and saying that an academic could spend one’s entire working life happily reading and writing. There is a great deal of truth in this statement and certainly the scope for writing is considerably greater than when I was in practice. I do recall waxing eloquent about the position of a bungalow located adjacent to the 11th tee of my local golf course and pointing out that it was fairly safe from mis-directed golf balls, since the 10th green was some 50 yards to the north-east. Mostly however one survey report contains much the same information as another and the surveyor must be aware of this fact when carrying out more than one survey for a particular client. Unless one is lucky enough to encounter an unusual form of construction or an unusual defect, the scope for descriptive prose is severely limited. However the room for writing any prose whatsoever in survey reports seems set to become even more limited with the impending introduction of the Home Condition Report. All that is required, it seems, is the barest minimum of text and what really matters is the selection of the appropriate condition rating. Since some organisations are hoping to train Home Inspectors in seven weeks, many of these new entrants would presumably be at a loss to write much in the way of text in any event!

This brings me to the second part of my rant. In my experience, many university surveying students would be at a similar disadvantage if called upon to write prose in their survey reports. I am horrified by the lack of recreational reading that many (particularly male) students confess to. There are those (including Gioia and Brass, 1985-1986, pp. 11-18) who advocate a completely different (usually visual rather than verbal-based) approach to teaching students brought up in the TV and video game era. In a lecture to about a hundred students a couple of years ago I was using the novels of a particular author to get a point across. One male student, who is actually quite bright and obtains reasonably good marks, stuck his hand up and asked me what a “novel” was! There really is a continuous dumbing-down of academic standards, particularly in secondary schools. I have been horrified to learn that many GCSE pupils will now be studying “Functional Mathematics” which is designed to equip them with the maths they need to cope with everyday life, i.e. arithmetic. Universities already invest a great deal of effort in teaching new students algebra so that they can cope with the formulae transformations required of them in subjects such as structures and environmental science. It seems that such institutions will have to devote even more energy in this direction very soon. Worse still, there is something called “Functional English” on the horizon. It surely isn’t too much for Universities to ask that new students should be numerate and literate but we seem to be moving ever further from this situation. Now I realise that students attracted to a career in surveying are not always academic high fliers but since the imposition of entry threshold standards by the RICS five years ago, surveying students must possess at least the national average A level points score. Therefore academics teaching on such courses are in a very good position to assess the quality of the “average” UK A level student. I sincerely hope that initiatives such as the “literacy hour” will start to improve the quality of these students over the next few years. I marked 70 assignments recently and two students out of this group thought that when a bathroom is located off a bedroom, then it is “on sweet”!

On the move

As I write this editorial I am about to leave my current employment to join Nottingham Trent University as a Principal Lecturer. My revised contact details can be found on the inside of the rear cover of the journal.

Mike Hoxley