As I explained two posts ago, I have been very busy editing a collective volume which gathers together my students’ essays on their experience of reading the Harry Potter series: it’s called Addictive and Wonderful. The .pdf file of the volume (132 pages!!) is now available online, from the UAB’s repository, at https://ddd.uab.cat/record/118225. I am […]
One of the main tasks I must fulfil as BA Coordinator is planning the schedule for next year. Calculations used to be simple: 1 credit was the equivalent of 10 teaching hours and, so, a full time, tenured teacher was supposed to teach 24 credits, 240 hours. My contract specifies that I work 37,5 hours […]
As I assumed it would happen, someone asks me what happens if during coffee with the teacher something else comes up. Actually she tells me her own story with an ex-teacher, now her romantic partner. This is my answer… the public one, the private is for her eyes only. I was once a member of […]
I was having coffee with an American visiting scholar and a local colleague from UB, and, I’m not sure in what exact moment of the conversation, he asked whether we had the habit of taking coffee with students, meaning the teachers in each Department. My colleague quickly replied “no, we don’t” and I answered almost […]
As we all know, the problem of how much reading a student is willing to do for a subject complicates enormously our task. A few weeks ago, one of our Erasmus students abroad explained that a typical Literature course in the university she’s visiting, Edinburgh, might have up to 10 books –basically one per week. […]
Yesterday I spent a complicated morning dealing with students whose papers presented evidence or suspicion of plagiarism. It used to be the case that students plagiarised from solid academic sources in full knowledge of what they did. The explanation that our very surprised students are now offering is that they have no idea how a […]
I have already written several entries about the matter of salaries. This one is prompted by a news item published in many media on 13th January regarding a seminar and a report by the ACUP (Associació Catalana d’Universitats Públiques). Their web (www.acup.cat) has detailed information about the seminar, including an interesting document which compares university […]
I have mentioned exams now and then here but have not really got around writing specifically about them. After marking a batch of 63 during two very intense working days (that’s 126 short essays on Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) this seems a good moment […]
The Office for the Quality of Teaching (Oficina per la Qualitat Docent, or OQD) of my university asks me to pass onto the Department’s students a link where they’ll find a survey about which competences are desirable in a teacher. Curioser and curioser, I discover that the survey demands no ID, so I take it […]
This post is, particularly, for our second-year Victorian Literature students who must be this week hurrying up to finish their paper proposals and thus meet the 18th November deadline. They have been asked to write a paper (1,500 words with three secondary sources) on the narrator(s) in either Oliver Twist or The Tenant of Wildfell […]