by wyrd on Thu Oct 24, 2002 2:59 pm
Yep, there is the funding thing, and from talking to Professor Greer, she is also concerned that some arts tutorial rooms are really inappropriate for their purpose, especially at subhonours level - there are some without enough desks or chairs for students, there are some held in tiny little claustraphobic rooms with too many people (the Social Anthropology Amerindian library springs to mind, for some reason, but the English department was also really guilty of this at subhonours). While it's nice when your tutor decides to move the tutorial to the grass outside the department, or the beach, or the pub, it's not good when this actually improves on resources (ie. the availablility of enough tables and chairs or even seating space on the ground for everyone to write notes easily and keep track of the page we were looking at). Crowded tutorials (whether through too many people or lack of available rooms of a suitable size) do nobody any favours.
Now, this being said, my (one semester - CS1002) experience of Computer Science was of nice small tutorials with enough chairs and a whiteboard, but no desks. The labs could be pretty crowded, although I usually managed to get a demonstrator's attention if required. (This was back when they still used S-Algol, and were in the Physics building. I have no idea about facilities now.)
I've got pretty limited experience of the sciences (I did 5 subhonours geography modules in my first two years here, back in the portacabin days, but they're one of those special case subjects, and anyway, they had a policy of not having anything recongnisable as tutorials). Still, I'd argue that, while science provision isn't necessarily perfect, arts could really do with more funding, providing it isn't taken away from more useful things. And I say that as a philosophy postgrad...