Because it doesn’t actually look comfortable. And it makes a terrible swishy noise whenever they move their arms.

Is the oxford college jacket not about status or even utility— is it an expression of loneliness, a hope that someone between the library and the lecture hall might recognise them and wave, or say hello.

But, over time, I’ve begun to wonder if they’re much lonelier than other generations, and the jacket also serves as an invitation to others from the college to say hello or even acknowledge them on the street outside.

My first thought was that the social status of being an Oxford student was becoming more important to the young people who come to study here— and maybe also a confusion about how to dress at uni? The jacket is utilitarian and offers anonymity.

We don’t lose all the students— but I’m worried we lose the ones that we would have been in a position to help the most.

Meanwhile the teacher / convenor / marker is left trying to articulate something important about actually reading and writing that at best will sound spiritual and metaphysical, and at worst like naïve misunderstanding of the powers in google notebook.

The idiosyncrasies of student writing and the evidence of their individual strength and weaknesses as readers and thinkers is masked, there’s no point in reading the essay because it bears no relationship to the student’s potential.

And at that juncture where a student might go back and read a source, why not merely delay and ask more questions of LM? The return to the text is delayed again, and then again…

The best students will ignore it because it offers an endless regression of bullet point summaries. But many students will see google notebook LM (falsely) as doing a better job at reading and comprehending than they ever could.