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, […]
I have spent several days recently writing the report for my assessment as a teacher by the regional Catalan authorities, an exercise that takes place every five years. Funnily, the Spanish authorities only ask that we apply to be assessed, also every five years, and I have not done any further paperwork towards that. In […]
I wrote almost eleven years ago—time does fly indeed—a post almost identical to what I was planning to write today: “The Other Books: The Problem of Non-Fiction” (https://blogs.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/2011/04/25/the-other-books-the-problem-of-non-fiction/). Good thing that I checked before I started writing today. This is proof that I may be beginning to repeat myself after so many years blogging (I […]