The bright student who visited me wanted to know what it takes to become a university teacher. Time, patience, luck, stamina, determination, pragmatism and the thickest possible skin. The other qualities –a teaching vocation, a passion for learning, good writing skills– are taken for granted to such as extent that I have never heard them […]
One of our brightest students visits me (see why below) and asks me, casually, seeing that I’m still stressed out, what exactly do teachers in July. This is tactful in comparison to the habitual ‘so, you’re already on holiday?’ with which I’m greeted by family and non-academic friends every year at this point. I always […]
If you’ve been following the news this week you’ll soon catch which Amina I mean: yes, Amina Arraf, the ‘author’ of the now notorious blog A Gay Girl in Damascus (http://damascusgirl.blogspot.com). By now the whole world knows that hers was a fake identity, invented by a 40-year-old American heterosexual man, Tom MacMaster, an MA student […]
In this unusual long weekend in June with no exercises to mark, and after a WHOLE lecture-less week in which I’ve managed to write non-stop I don’t know what trash (and thank God for that little time…!), I’ve finally managed to find some time to see two fine documentaries on the current crisis: Michael Moore’s […]
This is serendipity. I get from my excellent local library Jaume Cabré’s autobiographical essay on why and how he writes, El sentit de la ficció. As I read it on the train I find the perfect passage to close my first-year course on 20th C English Literature (pp. 24-25, in case you know the book). […]
I grab a coffee to start my day, sit in front of the TV to watch the news for a few minutes and this hits me in the face: the Generalitat announces plans to cut from 70% down to 40% the percentage of tenured staff in Catalan universities (see http://www.3cat24.cat/noticia/1225786/barcelones/El-govern-vol-reduir-en-un-30-els-professors-universitaris-amb-placa-fixa). First, I panic thinking they’ll […]
Yesterday I had the good fortune of seeing the British theatre company Forced Entertainment http://www.forcedentertainment.com here in Barcelona’s CCCB… and for just 7 euros!!! What a luxury, and what a beautiful way to close the great experience that teaching contemporary British theatre has been this semester. In case you’ve never heard of them, Tim Etchell’s […]
Yes, I’m always complaining, I know. I wish I could say that all the first-year students that took the English Literature quiz last Thursday passed it with flying colours. The truth is, mark this, that only 16 out of 59 managed to score at least 50 points (out of 100). What was the quiz about? […]
This cruel month of May is turning out to be quite peculiar in my academic life as regards doctoral dissertations. Today is 23, and in the three weeks of May I’ve gone through: an examining board for a dissertation supervised by someone else, the defence (or viva) of the second PhD dissertation I’ve supervised, the […]
(A brief note to say that this week-long absence from this blog feels much longer. May and not April is the cruellest month, if we judge by the overwhelming –or underwhelming– feeling that Spring is here, classes soon to end but pressure on our shoulders is higher than ever. Every conversation with a colleague ends […]