The search is on!
Last year in a post I listed some of the more unusual or unexpected terms entered by people in search engines which brought them to this blog. Here are some new ones I rather liked, not least because they demonstrate a fairly zany outlook, and because I cannot imagine how some of them ever got to me with those terms:
Poetry about university life
is name aran a form of the name john
we have 26 holidays per year
the university of whatever it takes
my generation and the zimmer frame
poetry my arse [apologies, but that's what they entered]
how can I get more money
where can I learn about life
what can you do with a minister
And then, here are some who may not have a completely open mind about their chosen topics:
for god’s sake pay no tuition fees
harm done to america by obama
parliamentarians should not be paid
universities are completely pointless
And here’s one who has worked it all out:
prondzynski is a shit
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August 24, 2009 at 5:46 pm
These are fabulous. I’d like to buy whoever entered ‘poetry my arse’ a drink, as it’s very much my own attitude to poetry (it wasn’t me, though, I promise!).
But the best of the lot has got to be ‘where can I learn about life’. It’s not so much that this brought them to your blog that amazes me, so much as the idea of typing this into Google in the first place. I wonder what kind of search result they were expecting/hoping for?!
August 24, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Well, Jilly, I would imagine they found what they were looking for…
August 24, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Yes, most of them were me, sorry.
I don’t know if you accept suggestions for your blog, but here is a news story of topical interest in Ireland; Kaplan has died
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090824-710760.html
It’s an interesting story; in the 1940s the US took the weird step of trying to remove any alignment between second level learning goals and third level entrance, they probably did this for discreditable reasons, striving was seen as an immigrant or non-WASP trait. Kapan countered this by working out how to tutor the SAT, however, this response, leading to a private for-profit tutoring industry, also has undesirable consequences for social justice. Malcolm Gladwell has a nice article about it
http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_12_17_a_kaplan.htm
Kaplan, it should be pointed out, has assets in Ireland, they own DBI and Portobello College.
August 24, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Thanks, Aoife. Yes, that would make a good topic.
August 26, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Fascinating article by Gladwell – thanks for the link. Of course an industry will develop to ‘train’ people for the HPAT test.