I’ve been at university for 17 days, and yesterday had my fifth contact hour: my second tutorial. ‘Tutes’ are what an Oxford education is all about. They’re the reason any self-respecting applicant will give when asked why they’re putting themselves through a three-month ordeal of entrance tests; essay samples; interviews, and an agonising, Christmas-ruining wait. Of course we weren’t swayed by the architecture, the prestige or the challenge: what we really wanted, my sixth-form self often insisted, was the chance to be ‘taught by the people who write the textbooks’.
It’s now dawning on me that we’re not really ‘taught’ at all — not in the conventional sense. What we’ve actually signed up for is a tri-fortnightly process whereby our tutors set us a question about which we know precisely nothing and to which that week’s lectures are almost certainly irrelevant.
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