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 […]
I do know that the correct word to name the document that describes a subject is “syllabus” but I’m using “teaching guide” here on purpose to discuss the new kind of syllabus we’ve been using since the beginning of our degree, three academic years ago. As degree Coordinator I’m facing now the daunting prospect of […]
I’m tempted to cut’n’paste my entry for 28 May 2011, written after marking a disastrous Literature quiz based on studying our handbook Introduction to English Literature. Yet, re-reading it, I notice that things are even worse this time around as, instead of 50 titles, the quiz covered only 20 –presumably those any self-respecting student of […]