Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

without discussion, I demand. How can we teach them to engage in critical debate when the most recent books in the library were bought in the 1970s? How can we teach them to write when there is no time to read their writing? He shrugs. I know, he says. I know it seems impossible but we get by. Þetta reddast. Calm down. Do your best. At least you don’t have to fill in any forms.

He’s right. My Icelandic working life is almost entirely unregulated. If I want to offer a new course at home, I have to fill in forms specifying learning outcomes, teaching methods, implications for resources, contact hours and primary and secondary reading lists. I am bound to follow these specifications in the classroom. I must take registers and upload the data onto the system. I must set essays of the approved length, getting the titles approved by the external examiner before issuing them to the students, and return these essays at the approved time, having provided written feedback that fills the approved space. I must give grades in accordance with the official marking criteria, and these grades’ conformity to the criteria must be confirmed by a colleague. I must report concerns about students’ health and welfare to the Student Support Officer. I must fill in forms detailing how I divide my time between teaching, research and administration. Older colleagues at home find these systems insulting and burdensome, and complain of over-regulation and a culture of infantilisation and distrust. Most of it seems more or less reasonable to me, but I do believe that I would continue to do my job to the best of my ability without surveillance. I’m looking forward to a year of free practice, teaching what I consider important and setting the work I think useful without needing to report and justify myself at every turn.

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The students are older than at home, and, if only in matters of style, more diverse. In England, there is a de facto uniform for undergraduates which changes every couple of years. When I left, I was usually the only woman in the room not wearing tight jeans with flat sheepskin boots. Here, there are people older than me dressed as if for a day at the office, women my age in skirts and sweaters, younger people in younger clothes. While I’m waiting for the students to read a passage, I look at the feet under the desks, and feel cheerfulness rising at the sight of hiking boots, high heels, brogues and Mary Janes. Icelanders leave high school at twenty, and so without interruptions to their education would be in their mid-twenties by the time they reach my combined third-year/MA classes, but most of the women have had interruptions. Icelanders have children much younger than Europeans and North Americans. It’s normal, the students assure me, when they ask about cultural differences and I tell them that students at home are rarely parents. We don’t understand why you’d wait until your thirties when you’re interrupting your career and the pregnancy’s more likely to be complicated and you must get more tired, they say. It just makes more sense to start in your twenties and then make a career. There are so many assumptions built into this comparison that I don’t know where to start. I explain about the cost of British childcare, and about employers’ discrimination against mothers, and about the expectation that women will spend years at home with the children. There are no stay-at-home mothers in Iceland, which is why there are no toddler groups. Everyone takes nine months’ parental leave, divided between the father and mother, and then there is forty hours a week of highly subsidised, high-quality childcare, and since no-one commutes this is enough for parents to work full-time. Students can have babies without undue financial hardship. There is no particular expectation that the person with whom you have babies in your twenties will be the person with whom you live in your thirties, the students explain, no stigma around the separation of parents or the mutability of love. Gender discrimination, it seems to me at the beginning, is simply not an issue in Iceland. I have a year’s holiday from the guilt that blights the lives of working mothers at home.

So many in the class assembled to learn about English Romantic Poetry are parents, and it does make a difference. A great deal of Wordsworth’s early poetry is about children, and for the first time I am not the only parent reading it. Mothers, I find, have less patience with Keats. Older women are more likely to notice Austen’s deep scepticism about marriage, less likely to insist on reading her as a romantic novelist. Everyone who turns up in class does all the reading, and those who don’t turn up are no concern of mine. There is no register. Icelandic students attend class or not, as they see fit, and in fact in the absence of regulations are much more careful about sending apologies than students at home whose attendance is monitored and recorded, and who can expect threatening e-mails and summonses if they miss too many sessions. Icelandic students do not seem to confide personal problems to academic staff, although as the weeks pass I begin to think that it is not an Icelandic habit to confide personal problems to anyone. University lecturers are in no way in loco parentis, and freed of my institutional obligation to be police-officer, mummy and teacher in one handy package, I find myself more interested in the students’ lives. For me and for them, it seems at the beginning, lack of regulation coincides with greater personal responsibility. Maybe, I think, this is how Iceland works, and the abominable driving and indeed the economic crisis are the dark side of an unfamiliar but sometimes functional approach to rules and responsibilities. The children at Tobias’s nursery, unfettered by what would be basic safety precautions at home, are not smashed