I’m beginning to sound like a broken record but I guess this is yet another sign of my incipient depression. A few days after the Spanish elections the Catalan government insidiously announced yet another paycut for civil servants, something between 1 and 3% to be deducted off the extra month’s salary paid in June and […]
I’m taking a break from my main task today: going through the 49 paper proposals that my second-year students have sent me (I’ve managed 37 so far… yupiii!!! And it’s only 16:00). This is the first time they write an abstract, which makes their difficulties to firmly state what they aim at doing quite understandable. […]
Two days before the beginning of the conference I have co-organised I got very concerned that we were short on student volunteers and, so, I asked my second-year class for help. There are 60 students in class, all of whom knew very well how important the conference was for me, as I had repeatedly explained. […]
I used my right not to be on strike to protect a conference I have been co-organising for the last 18 months from the disaster that the university strike programmed for 16 and 17 brought in. I agree that the situation in the Catalan universities is terrible but I don’t believe that strikes are an […]
Last Friday 11 as I got off the train at UAB a strong smell of garbage hit my nose. As I walked towards the Department using a back lane, I could soon see that the whole area from the station to the Faculties was covered in litter: crushed cans, plastic bags, rests of snacks… Another […]
I’m co-organising a three-day conference for which we have received proposals to present 31 round tables, 4 workshops and 146 papers. Yes, very successful. I happen to be coordinating the programme and, well, it’s very complicated because with 90 minutes sessions we need 8 simultaneous classrooms, which also makes it highly unlikely that panel attendance […]
I have spent whatever free time I’ve managed to hoard in the last ten days glued to the 1042 pages of Neal Stephenson’s last novel Reamde. The volume is not only very thick but also trade-paperback size, which means it is huge indeed. I’ve gone through Stephenson’s Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon (twice), The […]
After one month lecturing in my computer-less classroom, I’ve got used to it and even find myself enjoying very much the absence of a screen. I’ve gone back in time, no doubt, to offer that kind of old-fashioned type of Literature teaching based on massive doses of (my) reading aloud. Dickens helps very much in […]
I have plenty of work to do today but I feel too depressed to start without letting steam out here first. This depression stems from hearing news the whole week through about the pay cuts that our fellow civil servants, the doctors employed by the Institut Català de la Salut, are being forced to accept. […]
As a teacher I must say that one of the greatest satisfactions in seeing ex-students succeed professionally. Of course, ex-students who succeed in one’s own academic professional field elicit a little (or much…) envy, but that is truly fine: a healthy reminder of one’s limitations and even mediocrity, to which honest teachers must always be […]