Marking papers is exhausting because it has become a sad game of suspicion and also because I can’t help being appalled at how shallow secondary education has become –yes, I said secondary. First part: my second year students plagiarise from sources I can easily find and, then, they claim they’re actually quoting ‘indirectly.’ Others plagiarise […]
There’s a little bit of irony in the title of my blog but also a little bit of despair, as you can see from many of my postings, about the sad fact that teaching is not always as joyful as it should be. Yet, this is exactly what it is when it works well, joyful […]
Now that everyone is marking papers and exams, some colleagues and myself discuss over lunch the function of guides and guidelines (yes, you, students, occupy our thoughts a great deal of our time). I’m using these two words to distinguish the documents that offer information on a whole subject, and that we call Teaching Guides, […]
I’m taking a break from marking the 39 papers (minimum 1,000 words – maximum 2,500 words) I need to mark by Thursday, unless I want to spoil my weekend once more (my Friday is busy with other academic activities). I’m about to fulfil my 15 paper quota for today, which is not too bad, and […]
A very dear ex-student, Cristina Delgado, emails me a photo in which she appears sitting on the ground in the middle of the street with her boyfriend, surrounded by an impressive human wall made up of police agents. Both are doctoral students in England, just two among the many thousands forced to take the streets […]
I’ve just gone through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness once more, this time to teach it almost simultaneously in my post-grad subject on “The Vietnam War” for our MA, and in my under-grad subject on Victorian Literature. In the first case, I’ve also focused, of course, on Coppola’s Apocalypse Now!, which seems to me a worse […]
To begin with, I’m aware than I’m probably misusing the word ‘class’ as in the Anglo-American world teachers give lectures and teach seminars, whereas we, here in Spain, do a mixture of both, and, so, we teach ‘classes.’ Somebody correct me if I’m doubly wrong, please. Anyway, here’s my ranting and raving for today. If […]
A bright girl student pours down onto a long, singular email message the many reasons why she’s disappointed with Dickens: she “cannot see the literature” in Great Expectations, she dislikes Dickens’s too obvious moralising, and, generally, she finds him unable to impress her with a deep vision of what being human is about. He ‘doesn’t […]
I was teaching Wuthering Heights, trying to convince my students that when Heathcliff characterises his wife Isabella as a very dumb creature who has stupidly mistaken him for a gentleman hero of romance, Emily Brontë is actually pulling the rug under our feet –‘we’ being the women readers who, like Isabella, are mesmerised by the […]
A post today on the uses of virtual environments to help teach Literature. From the title you can see that this week I have been learning to use Moodle, maybe much later than you, my reader (if you exist), as it seems dear UAB has not been exactly in a hurry to open its Moodle […]