In my experience, because they didn’t do the reading. Had so many tutorials where only a couple of us had read the thing we were assigned in advance. Everyone else was just sheepishly trying to avoid being asked anything.
Only went to tutorials in case they gave out hints to upcoming exams
Was the author afraid to speak in college?
In ny case it was crippling anxiety.
Still don’t like being the only voice in the room all these years later.
There is an infantile streak in Irish culture where someone who speaks up gets sniggered at and mocked. People try to avoid that by keeping their head down.
People don’t enjoy public speaking either.
My general memory of university was that *a lot* of the comments made in class by American and foreign exchange students weren’t worth making.
Because they’ve no idea what’s going on and understand the more questions you ask the longer a class goes on.
Just an edit. THis is in work too. The more questions you ask, the longer that powerpoint goes on.
I remember my first seminar in college and the lecturer read a piece from the text and then turned to me and said, “What do you think?” No teacher had ever asked me that before, secondary school does not prepare you for a liberal arts education and you either sink or swim.
I remember engaging in a tutorial and politely pushing back on an idea she floated about the topic (because I thought that it was a space where you could do that?) and the Prof accusing me of “inciting” disagreement and “leading” the other students, who were all silent.
I shut up after that.
We were too often asked for answers in school, not to think.
I remember struggling with the maths in university that was mandatory for the first year. I organised a small group to work through the problems together but people only turned up expecting me to give them answers. I was not running a fucking tutorial, I had no clue either! There were a lot of people in the first session, and far fewer in subsequent ones.
Even in university there was a serious streak of anti-intellectualism and people wanting things handed to them with no idea how to survive alone.
Social anxiety
Haven’t studied/read up on the topic
Just not engaged/interested enough
Tired
Many more possibilities. And it’s not just an Irish thing
Who speaks most and asks most questions in college tutorials….the mature student.
The mature student has been out there, has tried and failed and is there to learn and try again. The younger student is there often simply because Mam and Dad want them to be there and they haven’t realised the difference between school and college. Not all, I loved my time in college, not every day, but most. But 100% of the time in every course you could always tell the people who wanted to be there because they were asking questions and engaging with the lecturer, rather than thinking it was just another school with a teacher.
Who knows, maybe this years failed student is a mature student in the making 3 years down the road
The one time I spoke up, the lecturer tore into me for getting it so wrong this close to the exams that it would be dangerous if I went on to pass them. You’d think it was a life or death thing like medicines but no, company law.
I always thought it’s social anxiety, preventing you from speaking to the whole room
I think it depends on the course a bit, but the secondary school system here definitely doesn’t value participation in discussion very much. You take notes and regurgitate information, particularly in the later years. It’s basically just playing a game of learning how to do an exam.
You you can see the very stark contrast between Irish students and students from some other systems, notably Americans who are very much encouraged to present and talk at school.
It wears off and evens out though as people become more used to presenting ideas and interacting.
Probably the same reason why people don’t speak during meetings in work
Tired, hungover, not read the required reading but will get marked down for not attending tutorial, someone else said what you were going to say, mature students taking over with stupid questions that everyone knows the answer to already… that was back about 10 years ago or more.
For me it just depended on the teacher.
Some teachers allowed us to ask questions and engage with critical thinking.
Some teachers just want the answer and they have no time or patience for anything else.
In first year of college I would be pretty silent…but after I realised the lecturer isn’t gonna target me because I disagreed with something they said etc that’s when I started engaging more vocally and constantly asking questions when a new topic was discussed.
I do agree though that everyone is pushed to sit the leaving but in places like a desc school they don’t really care if a kid sits the leaving or not and if they don’t sit the leaving they aren’t even told about apprenticships etc.
I know of a school that was constantly getting like 20% percent of 6th years to do the leaving cert…then suddenly it changed to 100%…it was weird for years the school was around 20% more or less.
So I looked closer, they stopped counting all the students who were in 6th year…and began only counting the students who actually sat the exam.
Idk in my course we hadnt covered anything new since our first semester during covid and we were going into 3rd year so most people had just given up by then and didnt really bother making any effort
Very simple;
Definite gains from shutting up include: Not being told you’re wrong, not being “THAT” guy who won’t shut up
Possible gains from speaking up include:
As someone who regularly runs tutorials I think it’s probably a combination of factors (including bad teaching techniques in some cases) and many of those factors might be subject specific. The LC certainly doesn’t help insofar as it leads some students to expect that they will be told the answers rather than asked to work out answers for themselves.
“Better to remain silent when thought a fool then speak and remove all doubt.”
Students only came to my tutorials in the hopes of getting exam info or practical examples in engineering. The ones with questions came up at the end, which was extremely frustrating but at least they tried. Lots of young Irish people don’t want to be the one to ask questions because they seem to have some fear of their question being stupid
In my experience its cause half the lecturers you have don’t want to talk, like at all. Tutorials are just basically extra lectures.
In my first year for our first two tutorials people did talk but both lecturers just got into an argument with people until they gave the answer they wanted to hear before continuing on the planned spiel. Following semesters no one really bothered as we all knew they were just rhetorical questions.
Went to university in Wales, and the only ones who talked a lot were those posh kids too dumb to get into Oxbridge. Their points were always daft but spoken with such confidence.
I went to uni as a mature student in my 30s. I was pretty much the only one who spoke during tutorials. Went through a phase of thinking “god this is mortifying” before I got over it and made the most of what was effectively one to one tuition
Because they aren’t keeping pace with the material and don’t want to draw attention to themselves.
My experience of people speaking in lecture halls
1. Irrelevant questions
2. Mature student sharing their life experience
3. Person not asking a question, more so paraphrasing the lecturer to make sure the lecturer knows they’re listening
Very little of value comes from speaking in lecture halls, it’s called a lecture for a reason. Tutorials are far greater mediums for discussions and questions
I studied Irish and maths in college. I’d always answer in Irish but I never had enough of an idea of what was going on in maths to even ask a question.
As an ex-tutor, I found by making tutorials a more relaxed environment for students helped. The LC doesn’t allow for self-thought or opinions. I found tutorials the best place to expand on information from what we had learnt in tutorials. Obviously, readings are key or else you won’t have a clue about what’s going on and most people go for attendance/exam tips. Tutorials should be a place where students can think for themselves and bounce ideas off each other but unfortunately that isn’t the case. Almost all international students were better at speaking than Irish students and even if their points “weren’t worth saying”, that confidence is still important. If you shit on those students (mature or international) then other students are going to wonder whether their points or valid and then they won’t have the confidence to speak them out loud.
Yup. This fits with my memories of tutorials at TCD: the few kids from English public schools providing 80% of the student interaction due to their being over-trained from birth to think that they are eloquent and intelligent, with opinions that deserve to be aired and considered; while the Irish majority scowled on at them in resentful silence due to their being over-trained from birth to avoid giving anyone reason to say that they had “notions”.
I’m an American who has had to teach tutorials at an Irish university and this was always tough for me to deal with. I did a lot of going around the room for input about topics or I’d call people out for questions, as fairly and compassionately as I could. Even so, it felt like I was marching through molasses some days to get through each tutorial.
I don’t know how I really feel about this article’s take on Irish vs American school systems other than I guess to say in their direction ‘careful what you wish for’. I think from the outside looking in it’s easy to miss that across large portions of the US, the school systems aren’t failing, they’ve *failed*. I’m not sure that the best take-away when looking at the US is to think ‘look how great blind confidence over there is going, this is definitely how I want my kids to act’. 
I was a tutor in TCD and in UCD. Yes, 1st year students are very quite, especially the first couple of months.
Some students must be under a lot of pressure though I don’t understand it well, as I first went to TCD in 3rd year having already done a Mineral Engineering Diploma in Athlone. So I didn’t get to experience the horrors of tutorials as a first year student. That said, I’ve tried to understand the problem, as that’s important in order to help students overcome this problem.
Anyway, I helped teach 1st year mineralogy class in TCD, asking students really simple questions about rocks and minerals, just getting them to say what they saw, joking that smelling the mineral doesn’t usually help (funny to see almost half of them start with smelling mineral specimens as if they have a special odour). All simple discriptive stuff, as easy as asking a student what colour the sky is? Just teaching them to be observant.
But the tension was overwhelming, they could hardly talk, on one occasion I had a student break down and cry over being asked if this black rock was black.
When in UCD I did tutorials with 1st year students, they were also very quite, not quite as bad as TCD. I think the talkative Italian students helped them open up a bit.
Anyways, in one of the tutorials we got them to talk about a little essay they wrote, to ease them into public speaking. Since this wasn’t going to work if they couldn’t speak, I asked them what the problem was.
They agreed it was the Leaving Cert, being told to be quite and learn is partly the issue, but a bigger aspect is being thought to pass exams by learning facts that are either right or wrong. If you get something wrong, teacher is there to tell you that you’re thick and didn’t pay attention, and the rest of the class is laughing at you.
As a result, a new 1st student arrives in college with two thoughts. Firstly, it’s not natural to talk back to somone who’s teaching you, and who’s way smarter than you.
Secondly everything you say is either right or wrong, and you feel examined, this is particularly frightening because you have in your mind that teacher is even smarter than back at Secondary School, and they are there to catch you out, make fun of you for being wrong.
What I found is that it was helpful for students to be told that in university there’s fewer black and white factual answers. Unlike the Leaving Cert, you are thought to debate and think, express opinions. It’s harder to be caught out and told you’re stupid for holding a sincere opinion.
I think it worked. I had students who came up to me before the tutorial asking to be exempt from speaking, actually speak. It was an achievement for them. I didn’t have a single student avoid speaking.
Im a 5th year exchange student from Germany and this is as true as it gets. You just sit there, it makes no difference if you play clash Royal or try to interact with the teacher. You’re just not supposed to be active during class. I feel like im treated as a child that can’t think on its own.
As a Lecturer/Teacher it is definitely something that has become steadily worse over the last 10-20-years. I think it has something to do with why people do their chosen courses in the first place. I was a very enthusiastic student because – well, why wouldn’t I be? It makes me sad that students spend so many years doing something they don’t care about.
Most of my colleagues simply do not even try anymore because it’s so torturous and students complain. I myself prefer the long, elongated silences and uncomfortable staring at the floor.
I should add, some students have all sorts of good reasons not to speak in tutorials and seminars based on certain conditions or overt shyness and anxiety. That’s obviously fair enough and I try to work with those students to contribute more for their sake, not mine.
I finished my degree last year and I was the only person who showed up to them a lot of the time. My course was in social sciences and some of the people in charge of the tutorials had significant academic experience so I’d just chat with them for an hour about things related to my course instead of doing the actual tutorial lol
Probably the slaggin culture in Ireland has knocked the confidence out of them
I used to teach tutorials at Uni and BOY IT WAS HARD
In each course there would be 1 or two students that actually talked to me out of pity, the rest was just dead silent.
Attendance wasn’t even obligatory and I secretly admired how 20 grown adults would just sit there and do it say nothing for an hour.
Some courses turned into lectures because I was just tired of having discussions with only one student or simply with myself.
You are studying a fucking language, you have to fucking talk!
Shoutout to those students who make their lecturer feel better by simply answering questions. Lots of love!
38 comments
In my experience, because they didn’t do the reading. Had so many tutorials where only a couple of us had read the thing we were assigned in advance. Everyone else was just sheepishly trying to avoid being asked anything.
Only went to tutorials in case they gave out hints to upcoming exams
Was the author afraid to speak in college?
In ny case it was crippling anxiety.
Still don’t like being the only voice in the room all these years later.
There is an infantile streak in Irish culture where someone who speaks up gets sniggered at and mocked. People try to avoid that by keeping their head down.
People don’t enjoy public speaking either.
My general memory of university was that *a lot* of the comments made in class by American and foreign exchange students weren’t worth making.
Because they’ve no idea what’s going on and understand the more questions you ask the longer a class goes on.
Just an edit. THis is in work too. The more questions you ask, the longer that powerpoint goes on.
I remember my first seminar in college and the lecturer read a piece from the text and then turned to me and said, “What do you think?” No teacher had ever asked me that before, secondary school does not prepare you for a liberal arts education and you either sink or swim.
I remember engaging in a tutorial and politely pushing back on an idea she floated about the topic (because I thought that it was a space where you could do that?) and the Prof accusing me of “inciting” disagreement and “leading” the other students, who were all silent.
I shut up after that.
We were too often asked for answers in school, not to think.
I remember struggling with the maths in university that was mandatory for the first year. I organised a small group to work through the problems together but people only turned up expecting me to give them answers. I was not running a fucking tutorial, I had no clue either! There were a lot of people in the first session, and far fewer in subsequent ones.
Even in university there was a serious streak of anti-intellectualism and people wanting things handed to them with no idea how to survive alone.
Social anxiety
Haven’t studied/read up on the topic
Just not engaged/interested enough
Tired
Many more possibilities. And it’s not just an Irish thing
Who speaks most and asks most questions in college tutorials….the mature student.
The mature student has been out there, has tried and failed and is there to learn and try again. The younger student is there often simply because Mam and Dad want them to be there and they haven’t realised the difference between school and college. Not all, I loved my time in college, not every day, but most. But 100% of the time in every course you could always tell the people who wanted to be there because they were asking questions and engaging with the lecturer, rather than thinking it was just another school with a teacher.
Who knows, maybe this years failed student is a mature student in the making 3 years down the road
The one time I spoke up, the lecturer tore into me for getting it so wrong this close to the exams that it would be dangerous if I went on to pass them. You’d think it was a life or death thing like medicines but no, company law.
I always thought it’s social anxiety, preventing you from speaking to the whole room
I think it depends on the course a bit, but the secondary school system here definitely doesn’t value participation in discussion very much. You take notes and regurgitate information, particularly in the later years. It’s basically just playing a game of learning how to do an exam.
You you can see the very stark contrast between Irish students and students from some other systems, notably Americans who are very much encouraged to present and talk at school.
It wears off and evens out though as people become more used to presenting ideas and interacting.
Probably the same reason why people don’t speak during meetings in work
Tired, hungover, not read the required reading but will get marked down for not attending tutorial, someone else said what you were going to say, mature students taking over with stupid questions that everyone knows the answer to already… that was back about 10 years ago or more.
For me it just depended on the teacher.
Some teachers allowed us to ask questions and engage with critical thinking.
Some teachers just want the answer and they have no time or patience for anything else.
In first year of college I would be pretty silent…but after I realised the lecturer isn’t gonna target me because I disagreed with something they said etc that’s when I started engaging more vocally and constantly asking questions when a new topic was discussed.
I do agree though that everyone is pushed to sit the leaving but in places like a desc school they don’t really care if a kid sits the leaving or not and if they don’t sit the leaving they aren’t even told about apprenticships etc.
I know of a school that was constantly getting like 20% percent of 6th years to do the leaving cert…then suddenly it changed to 100%…it was weird for years the school was around 20% more or less.
So I looked closer, they stopped counting all the students who were in 6th year…and began only counting the students who actually sat the exam.
Idk in my course we hadnt covered anything new since our first semester during covid and we were going into 3rd year so most people had just given up by then and didnt really bother making any effort
Very simple;
Definite gains from shutting up include: Not being told you’re wrong, not being “THAT” guy who won’t shut up
Possible gains from speaking up include:
As someone who regularly runs tutorials I think it’s probably a combination of factors (including bad teaching techniques in some cases) and many of those factors might be subject specific. The LC certainly doesn’t help insofar as it leads some students to expect that they will be told the answers rather than asked to work out answers for themselves.
“Better to remain silent when thought a fool then speak and remove all doubt.”
Students only came to my tutorials in the hopes of getting exam info or practical examples in engineering. The ones with questions came up at the end, which was extremely frustrating but at least they tried. Lots of young Irish people don’t want to be the one to ask questions because they seem to have some fear of their question being stupid
In my experience its cause half the lecturers you have don’t want to talk, like at all. Tutorials are just basically extra lectures.
In my first year for our first two tutorials people did talk but both lecturers just got into an argument with people until they gave the answer they wanted to hear before continuing on the planned spiel. Following semesters no one really bothered as we all knew they were just rhetorical questions.
Went to university in Wales, and the only ones who talked a lot were those posh kids too dumb to get into Oxbridge. Their points were always daft but spoken with such confidence.
I went to uni as a mature student in my 30s. I was pretty much the only one who spoke during tutorials. Went through a phase of thinking “god this is mortifying” before I got over it and made the most of what was effectively one to one tuition
Because they aren’t keeping pace with the material and don’t want to draw attention to themselves.
My experience of people speaking in lecture halls
1. Irrelevant questions
2. Mature student sharing their life experience
3. Person not asking a question, more so paraphrasing the lecturer to make sure the lecturer knows they’re listening
Very little of value comes from speaking in lecture halls, it’s called a lecture for a reason. Tutorials are far greater mediums for discussions and questions
I studied Irish and maths in college. I’d always answer in Irish but I never had enough of an idea of what was going on in maths to even ask a question.
As an ex-tutor, I found by making tutorials a more relaxed environment for students helped. The LC doesn’t allow for self-thought or opinions. I found tutorials the best place to expand on information from what we had learnt in tutorials. Obviously, readings are key or else you won’t have a clue about what’s going on and most people go for attendance/exam tips. Tutorials should be a place where students can think for themselves and bounce ideas off each other but unfortunately that isn’t the case. Almost all international students were better at speaking than Irish students and even if their points “weren’t worth saying”, that confidence is still important. If you shit on those students (mature or international) then other students are going to wonder whether their points or valid and then they won’t have the confidence to speak them out loud.
Yup. This fits with my memories of tutorials at TCD: the few kids from English public schools providing 80% of the student interaction due to their being over-trained from birth to think that they are eloquent and intelligent, with opinions that deserve to be aired and considered; while the Irish majority scowled on at them in resentful silence due to their being over-trained from birth to avoid giving anyone reason to say that they had “notions”.
I’m an American who has had to teach tutorials at an Irish university and this was always tough for me to deal with. I did a lot of going around the room for input about topics or I’d call people out for questions, as fairly and compassionately as I could. Even so, it felt like I was marching through molasses some days to get through each tutorial.
I don’t know how I really feel about this article’s take on Irish vs American school systems other than I guess to say in their direction ‘careful what you wish for’. I think from the outside looking in it’s easy to miss that across large portions of the US, the school systems aren’t failing, they’ve *failed*. I’m not sure that the best take-away when looking at the US is to think ‘look how great blind confidence over there is going, this is definitely how I want my kids to act’. 
I was a tutor in TCD and in UCD. Yes, 1st year students are very quite, especially the first couple of months.
Some students must be under a lot of pressure though I don’t understand it well, as I first went to TCD in 3rd year having already done a Mineral Engineering Diploma in Athlone. So I didn’t get to experience the horrors of tutorials as a first year student. That said, I’ve tried to understand the problem, as that’s important in order to help students overcome this problem.
Anyway, I helped teach 1st year mineralogy class in TCD, asking students really simple questions about rocks and minerals, just getting them to say what they saw, joking that smelling the mineral doesn’t usually help (funny to see almost half of them start with smelling mineral specimens as if they have a special odour). All simple discriptive stuff, as easy as asking a student what colour the sky is? Just teaching them to be observant.
But the tension was overwhelming, they could hardly talk, on one occasion I had a student break down and cry over being asked if this black rock was black.
When in UCD I did tutorials with 1st year students, they were also very quite, not quite as bad as TCD. I think the talkative Italian students helped them open up a bit.
Anyways, in one of the tutorials we got them to talk about a little essay they wrote, to ease them into public speaking. Since this wasn’t going to work if they couldn’t speak, I asked them what the problem was.
They agreed it was the Leaving Cert, being told to be quite and learn is partly the issue, but a bigger aspect is being thought to pass exams by learning facts that are either right or wrong. If you get something wrong, teacher is there to tell you that you’re thick and didn’t pay attention, and the rest of the class is laughing at you.
As a result, a new 1st student arrives in college with two thoughts. Firstly, it’s not natural to talk back to somone who’s teaching you, and who’s way smarter than you.
Secondly everything you say is either right or wrong, and you feel examined, this is particularly frightening because you have in your mind that teacher is even smarter than back at Secondary School, and they are there to catch you out, make fun of you for being wrong.
What I found is that it was helpful for students to be told that in university there’s fewer black and white factual answers. Unlike the Leaving Cert, you are thought to debate and think, express opinions. It’s harder to be caught out and told you’re stupid for holding a sincere opinion.
I think it worked. I had students who came up to me before the tutorial asking to be exempt from speaking, actually speak. It was an achievement for them. I didn’t have a single student avoid speaking.
Im a 5th year exchange student from Germany and this is as true as it gets. You just sit there, it makes no difference if you play clash Royal or try to interact with the teacher. You’re just not supposed to be active during class. I feel like im treated as a child that can’t think on its own.
As a Lecturer/Teacher it is definitely something that has become steadily worse over the last 10-20-years. I think it has something to do with why people do their chosen courses in the first place. I was a very enthusiastic student because – well, why wouldn’t I be? It makes me sad that students spend so many years doing something they don’t care about.
Most of my colleagues simply do not even try anymore because it’s so torturous and students complain. I myself prefer the long, elongated silences and uncomfortable staring at the floor.
I should add, some students have all sorts of good reasons not to speak in tutorials and seminars based on certain conditions or overt shyness and anxiety. That’s obviously fair enough and I try to work with those students to contribute more for their sake, not mine.
I finished my degree last year and I was the only person who showed up to them a lot of the time. My course was in social sciences and some of the people in charge of the tutorials had significant academic experience so I’d just chat with them for an hour about things related to my course instead of doing the actual tutorial lol
Probably the slaggin culture in Ireland has knocked the confidence out of them
I used to teach tutorials at Uni and BOY IT WAS HARD
In each course there would be 1 or two students that actually talked to me out of pity, the rest was just dead silent.
Attendance wasn’t even obligatory and I secretly admired how 20 grown adults would just sit there and do it say nothing for an hour.
Some courses turned into lectures because I was just tired of having discussions with only one student or simply with myself.
You are studying a fucking language, you have to fucking talk!
Shoutout to those students who make their lecturer feel better by simply answering questions. Lots of love!