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 […]
I’ll be teaching again next year the elective ‘English Theatre’ and I’m reconsidering the texts I used 2 years ago. In that edition I asked my students to read two anthologies, Grahame Whybrow’s Modern Drama: Plays of the ’80s and ’90s and Alekz Seirz’s Twenty-First Century British Plays (both Methuen). 10 plays in total, 36 […]
To my surprise Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979, English translation 1984), based on field work in late 1960s and early 1970s France, still makes perfect sense today. I don’t know whether this is because Spain is till catching up with the France he portrays, or because, essentially, Europe’s patterns of consumption have not changed that much […]
Last Saturday, 21 April, the Spanish Government issued a new decree (see BOE http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2012/04/21/pdfs/BOE-A-2012-5337.pdf), cheerfully called “de medidas urgentes de racionalización del gasto público en el ámbito educativo.” According to this decree, although university teachers are still supposed to teach 24 ECTS credits a year (= 4 semestral subjects), this workload may be increased or […]
This is one of the entries left in my inkpot because of the student strike last March. I realise now that it makes a good companion to my previous entry, so here it is. Any Literature teacher knows that it’s never enough (“until your heart stops beating” – extra points if you catch which lyrics […]
I have a list of themes waiting to be addressed, as the series of protests culminating in today’s general strike demand more attention than what might seem today just trivial Literature matters. How I long to get back to normality, if this can ever happen in this abnormal, subnormal, paranormal culture of ours. Let me […]
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 […]