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 […]
I re-read the posts I wrote in early September 2020 and 2021, at the beginning of the academic year, and bad as the situation was then because of the widespread presence of Covid-19, they even sound optimistic in comparison to what lies ahead. Talking yesterday with my seventeen-year-old niece, who starts next week her studies […]
Releí los posts que escribí a principios de septiembre de 2020 y 2021, al inicio del curso académico, y por muy mala que fuera la situación entonces por la presencia generalizada del Covid-19, incluso suenan optimistas en comparación con lo que se avecina. Hablando ayer con mi sobrina de diecisiete años, que comienza la próxima […]
I have an immensely talented doctoral student from Australia, and when I asked her whether she has considered applying for a job at a university back home, I got all confused because she started telling me that fees have gone up dramatically, and this makes things complicated. Sure, I replied, but I meant applying for […]
In a recent teachers’ meeting the pressing issue of students’ low attendance this last semester came up. I have not been teaching but my colleagues tell me less than 50% of the students have attended classes, which is even lower than what I saw in the first semester, when we were all still wearing facemasks […]
To my surprise, my school invited me to attend a seminar by writer and coach Neus Arquès addressed to making our personal brands more solid and visible. Having turned herself into a self-employed consultor, Arquès claims that she was one of the introducers in Spain of the idea of the personal brand, beyond, I assume, […]
I whole-heartedly recommend the delicious collective volume edited by psychologist Jean-François Marmion, The Psychology of Stupidity (2020; originally Psychologie de la Connerie, 2018; trans. Liesl Schillinger) for its truly glorious outing of all types of thoughtlessness. It is really thought-provoking! Marmion’s volume warns that stupidity is hard to define and explore because it has multiple […]
BACK TO BASICS, WITH A CALL TO RENEW SELF-IMPROVEMENT IN LEARNING I’m now in the middle of reading the essay by the philosopher and pedagogue Gregorio Luri, La escuela no es un parque de atracciones: Una defensa del conocimiento poderoso [School is not a Theme Park: In Defence of Powerful Knowledge, 2020], which, of course, […]