It’s the third time I refer here to the MQD (‘Improving Teaching Quality’) project for Literature I’m a member of since 2010. Our strategy in the last two years has passed through focusing on the narrator when teaching fiction, a strategy which, I believe, has worked quite well for us, teachers and students. This focus […]
One of our students is spending her Erasmus year abroad in Dublin. She visits me during her reading week break and when I ask her what’s it like there, she tells me it’s “Bologna well applied.” I smile at her candid verdict, cringing inwardly, and ask her what she means. Well, this year she’s being […]
I start here a little experiment: a series of, in principle, 5 collaborations with Cristina García Leitón, a student taking a combined BA in Spanish and English. Cristina runs her own blog, http://palabrascomosouvenir.blogspot.com.es/, and when I saw that she has a little subsection called ‘Aventuras y desventuras de una filóloga en proceso’ (within her Literature […]
I haven’t been able to find a better title for this post possibly because this is it: I want to write about the work I have taught most often throughout my 21 years as a university teacher. It used to be Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights until I took a break from it to teach Anne […]
Last Saturday I attended a seminar on the use of up-to-date computer technologies at my other university, the online Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. I’ve been teaching an ‘Introduction to English Literature’ for undergrads, compulsory for the degrees in ‘Humanities’ and ‘Language and Literature’, since 1998; it’s currently the 27th semester I do so. And I […]
At the end of a rainy afternoon I watch the 2003 documentary Stupidity (on YouTube). It’s not very good but at least the producers are brave enough to address the question of why stupidity is so popular in our days (much more so when the documentary was filmed, during Bush jr.’s first mandate). The key […]
Although I try to take regularly some of the teacher-training courses offered by my university, I find them, and the academic literature on higher-education teaching, generally too disconnected from my specific needs as a second-language teacher of Literature. The same applies to the bibliography on using Literature to teach English, which is not at all […]
An MA student, Rubén, asks me to supervise his dissertation on Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road –a novel I promised myself not to touch ever after seeing the film adaptation (because of its very ugly plot). Yet, what can I do? I like his proposal to consider 1950s masculinity and so… I must read […]
One of our Erasmus students at Edinburgh emails us the reading list for one of her subjects, a crash course on ‘Scottish Fiction’ (third year, I guess): Week 1. Introduction; extracts from Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771) and James Barker, The Wonder of All the Gay World (1749) Week 2. Walter Scott, The Heart of […]
Possibly, each anecdote deserves a separate entry but since they seem to be interconnected somehow, here they are together. I show a student where the plagiarised sentence she’s used comes from (a website) and she claims not to be aware of having copied –her defence is that the complete sentence stayed in her mind like […]