Back on May 12 I published a post commenting on my students collective volume, Addictive and Wonderful: Reading the Harry Potter Series (https://ddd.uab.cat/record/118225). Today, I’m announcing the publication of our second collective volume, Charming and Bewitching: Considering the Harry Potter Series (https://ddd.uab.cat/record/122987/). The elective I taught last Spring, ‘Cultural Studies in English: The Case of […]
I have chosen a very tricky topic for this, my 300th post, inspired by an article in El País, entitled “La Universidad expulsa a 30.000 alumnos al año por rendir poco” (http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2014/08/27/actualidad/1409163082_894501.html). I don’t know what to make of the word ‘expels’ in this headline, as I connect it with inadmissible behaviour. I would have […]
Oddly enough, BA dissertations are eliciting quite a high degree of personal involvement from both students and teachers. I say oddly enough because this is unexpected for a dissertation at this basic level, and because the teachers are not reacting in the same way to students in their own BA courses. Possibly, not even to […]
A pleased colleague tells me he’s been awarded the fifth ‘sexenio’, which means that his last personal research assessment exercise was positive and that he has validated by now, before the corresponding Ministry’s agency, 30 years of research. He tells me that this fifth exercise is valid for the rest of his professional life and […]
In the last month I have given advice to three students who’d like to pursue an academic career and, to be honest, I didn’t know what to tell them. The easiest part is describing the mechanics of doctoral programmes and the accreditation system. The hardest part is assessing for them their chances to ever get […]
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. […]