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 […]
I’m returning to James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, which I discussed two posts ago, this time to reflect on the strategies required to face such a long read for academic purposes. Whereas mainstream and literary novels are usually published as stand-alone volumes, series abound in genre fiction. They are sometimes bound by the presence […]
I’ve been reading these days a delicious book edited by non-fiction guru Lee Gutkind, What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher, and I’m borrowing his title for my post (you can take a peek at the book on Google Books). This lovely volume gathers together twenty brief memoirs by a variety of […]
Next semester I will teaching an MA subject on popular music and masculinity as a sort of sequel to the BA course I taught last year which led to the publication of the collective e-book by the students Songs of Empowerment: Women in 21st Century Popular Music (downloadable for free). I wrote a post presenting […]