This is a regular teaching day for me this semester: 8:30-10:00, 20th Century Literature (compulsory), I face my sleepy-eyed, unmotivated first year students: 50% attendance, of those in class 50% don’t take notes (apparently they don’t even bring paper to class) and 50% don’t even bother to conceal their boredom (the ones not taking notes […]
I spent 4 hours last Friday in a seminar on formative continuous assessment applied to university teaching. The seminar, run by Joan Simón, a Pharmacy senior lecturer at UB (http://joansimon.nom.es/cms3/), was very good, and served partly as a therapy session, which we, first year teachers down in the trenches, need badly. As usual, though, I […]
I have heard many voices explaining that the cost of the MAs we established barely 5 years ago is too high for the Catalan university to maintain. I could not quite understand this as our now dying MA ‘Advanced English Studies: Literature and Culture’ (slashed for having less than 10 students) cost more or less […]
I’m enrolled to write paperwork for a new MA and I’m dismayed by how much we’re asked to do in so little time. This is so habitual in academia all over the world, I know I shouldn’t be surprised. Also habitual is the supposition that paperwork must always be a priority, which means, specifically, that […]
Josep María Pou has staged J.B. Priestley’s classic An Inspector Calls at Teatre Goya here in BCN for the first time in Spain, with the exception of a 1973 version for TVE’s Estudio 1 (um, the good old times when drama had a place on Spanish TV… The new version didn’t apparently get the expected […]
Yesterday four students offered us Scene 1 and Scene 2 of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, with a courage and enthusiasm far beyond my expectations. Josep and Helena, Julia and Isabella played Ian and Cate, with Julia doubling as the Soldier. To begin with, in Scene 1 we had a young couple (happy, I assume!) playing the […]
Last week we witnessed in class the struggle, brilliantly solved, of four students –Sara, David, Carla and, secondarily, María– with Terry Johnson’s demanding intellectual farce Hysteria (1993). They made the most of a plot which narrates Freud’s morphine-induced circular dream (or nightmare); in it, his subconscious or, rather, his conscience embodied by a naked woman, […]
Two years ago I had the great pleasure of writing with my friend Gerardo Rodríguez a paper on Kylie Minogue, which we presented at the 2009 AEDEAN at Cádiz. Yesterday, we both had the pleasure of seeing Kylie perform here in Barcelona to a full Palau Sant Jordi (her boyfriend, top model Andrés Velencoso, included!!!). […]
Introductions to particular literary periods, genres or schools make me as nervous as a party where I don’t know anyone: I want to meet everyone but I know that I’ll end up mixing up faces and stories and making serious gaffes (um, same problem with academic conferences, apologies to all concerned…). I’m currently going through […]
This week the experiment of having students perform scenes from a selection of contemporary British plays in class has started… with top results!! The first texts were Act I and Act III of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and I can only say that the women students playing the roles turned out to be top performers […]