As readers and spectators, we tend to think of the means of transport as background elements of moderate importance. Yet, the moment I do some digging, what emerges is a rather complex picture of their relevance in the stories we tell and consume. I am thinking of this matter today because of two lectures. […]
As I announced in the first post of this year, I have launched a new edition of the Department’s Book Club. My collaborator, Felicity Hand, and myself visited a series of classrooms a couple of weeks ago to present the club, and sent all the students an email message through the BA and MA degree […]
Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and dispels all the dark clouds of anxiety and depression that plagued so many people last year. My first post of this new year deals with my Department’s book club. We have been running a club for a few years […]
This post is extremely difficult to write without sounding whiny and defensive, but I do need to write it, particularly considering that I don’t seem to have dealt with the matter of students’ ratings of faculty in almost thirteen years of blogging. So here we go. I have access to the students’ assessment of […]
[Just a brief note to say that I have been missing in action for three weeks totally snowed under an avalanche of exercises and papers. I could have written once more about the pains of marking, but I find it gives me no relief from the frustration of realizing that the students who fail are […]
My second-year students need to write a paper on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which they must cite a minimum of three secondary sources. I give them a list of 23 topics from which they can choose, with the only restriction that only a maximum of 3 students can choose the same topic. In this […]
Whereas my MA students rarely skip classes and only do so for justified reasons, I cannot make sense of the attendance pattern in my BA class. There are 63 students officially registered, of whom 58 appear to be following the course according to the exercises handed in and our online activities. However, classroom attendance varies […]
I have written so far two posts on the matter of supervising PhD students (see “A doctoral student abandons: At a loss what to advise…” of 2014, and “Supervising doctoral students: A complicated task” of 2015). Actually, I have published three more posts on doctoral students, but these two are most directly connected with the […]
Nine months ago I published the post “Depression and Anxiety: The Main Academic Keywords Today” and I return today to the topic out of a need to process a situation that is beginning to make me quite angry. I am going through a personal complicated period, with immediate material causes that are slowly sorting […]
You may have noticed that newspapers have started carrying audio versions of a selection of articles, perhaps in some cases of all their articles. I first noticed this in La Vanguardia, which offers the audio version only to its subscribers, considering it a premium service. Obviously, the audio versions are not uploaded for the benefit […]