More of the same yesterday to begin our day: the Facultat uglified by barricades in each corridor (wo)manned by humourless, verbally aggressive students defending the ‘consensus’ reached by the assembly to stop all lecturing. We do whatever we can to defend our right to teach/learn: go on-line, go elsewhere… Our own English Studies students have […]
Yesterday you and me found ourselves unable to access our classrooms and teach, which is what we love doing and are (under)paid for. The corridors were blocked by the usual assembly students announcing that the Facultat had been occupied and that it was in everyone’s interest not to do any teaching or learning… to guarantee […]
[I pretty much doubt that our busy Dean, Teresa Cabré –just re-elected– reads my blog, yet here’s my open letter for her (just in case, you never know).] Dear Dean, As I’m sure you know very well from personal experience, the ‘Facultat’ decided in time immemorial (before my time as a student) to start lectures […]
One of the wonders of teaching is that one never stops learning. Here’s proof. I’ve been teaching my first year students an introduction to the short story, based on Mansfield (“Bliss”), Joyce (“The Sisters”) and Woolf (“Kew Gardens”). I insisted that the Modernist short story is only one branch of the modern short story and […]
I am now part of a team of UAB and UB Literature teachers grouped together in an ‘MQD’ project (‘Millora de la Qualitat Docent’ = Teaching Quality Improvement). Our aim is improving our methodology by focusing on the narrator when teaching Literature. This is the reason why we decided to ask students to write their […]
One of my second-year students emails me a paper with a suspiciously wide-ranging vocabulary. I smell the usual rat, google the suspect sentences like mad but find no convincing evidence of plagiarism. My gut feeling, however, tells me that something has gone awry and, rightly or wrongly, I award the paper the lowest possible mark, […]
Last Sunday I watched on TV3 a French documentary on Korean secondary-school kids, “South Korea, Slave to Education.” The film explains that Korean students are doing marvellously according to the PISA yearly report and also that they hold a top world record in that 8 out of 10 attend university. The thesis, however, as you […]
I have just finished marking a batch of 48 papers (1,200 words on average each), a task which has taken much of my time this week, the weekend included. I wish actually I could say I’m done, for the downside of all that time and effort is that the poorest 23 of these papers will […]
In this and the following entry I’d like to write about two very different books I’ve been reading for academic purposes, in one case connected with teaching and in the other with the search for a topic linked to a conference. You’ll see why. I chose Rafael Yglesias’s novel A Happy Marriage (2009) for my […]
At the last count, the male students following actively my Victorian Literature subject are 9 in a class of 50 active students (by this I mean that about 10 more are registered but never show up). This is about 20%, slightly higher than in other courses I have taught, in which the proportion was usually […]