An Appetite for Wonder

The encouragement provided by the weekly tutorial meant that one didn’t just read about starfish hydraulics, or whatever the topic was: for that one week, I remember that I slept, ate and dreamed starfish hydraulics. Tube feet marched behind my eyelids, hydraulic pedicellariae quested and sea water pulsed through my dozing brain. Writing my essay was the catharsis, and the tutorial was the justification for the entire week. And then the next week there would be a new topic and a new feast of images to be conjured up in the library. We were being educated . ​​​​​. ​​​​​. And I believe it is largely to this week-by-week training that I owe such writing ability as I may be judged

nile essays on the philosophy of biology were any good – with hindsight I know they weren’t – but I can say that I have never forgotten the exhilaration of writing them, or the feeling of being a real scholar as I read in the library.

I’m not saying that my juve

posal for follow-up research, and theoretical and philosophical discussion of the issues that the thesis raised. Never for one moment did it occur to either tutor or pupil to wonder whether this assignment would be directly useful for answering some exam question.

Each week my tutorial assignment was to read one DPhil (Oxford-speak for PhD) thesis. My essay was to be a combination of DPhil examiner’s report, review of the history of the subject in which the thesis fell, pro

I exaggerate a little when I advise never to take notes. If a lecturer produces an original thought, something striking that makes you think, then by all means write yourself a memo to think again about it later, or look something up. But struggling to record a piece of every sentence the lecturer utters – which is what I tried to do – is pointless for the student and demoralizing for the lecturer.

Theoretically the idea was to use your lecture notes in revision, but I never looked at mine ever again and I suspect that most of my colleagues didn’t either. The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought. You watch a good lecturer thinking aloud in front of you, reaching for a thought, sometimes grabbing it out of the air like the celebrated historian A. J. P. Taylor. A good lecturer thinking aloud, reflecting, musing, rephrasing for clarity, hesitating and then grasping, varying the pace, pausing for thought, can be a role model in how to think about a subject and how to transmit a passion for it. If a lecturer drones information as though reading it, the audience might as well read it – possibly in the lecturer’s own book.