Tag Archives: teaching
The May Marks Meeting: That’s What It’s All About
Today we held one of our department’s most cherished and loathed rituals: the “May Marks Meeting.” It’s called that because one of its key elements is the annual review of students’ marks in aid of awarding our departmental scholarships and prizes, and also because we go over the standing of all of our current graduate [...]
Is Cormac McCarthy a Terrible Writer?
For the record, I don’t think so. In fact, I think he’s brilliant. Mind you, so far I’ve read only The Road. Still, though I had my doubts when I began it for the first time, by the time I finished it I was under the spell of its strange, difficult, deeply poetic language. I’ve been reading [...]
This Week In My Classes: Cranford and The Road
The honeymoon is over. At the beginning of every term things putter along easily enough while I wonder why I felt so stressed out at the end of the previous term … and then marking starts to come in, and the new assignment sequences dreamed up over the break loom on the horizon and require [...]
This Week In My Classes: Information and Education
We’re starting new books in both of my classes this week (well, weather permitting, we are, anyway!): The Road in Introduction to Literature and Cranford in 19th-Century Fiction. What makes this a particularly exciting but also daunting prospect for me is that they aren’t just the next books on our syllabus but they are also [...]
This Week in My Classes: Focus on Writing
I don’t seem to be posting my teaching updates with the regularity I used to: “this week” too often means “last week” or “these days.” I was wondering why I put off posting, and I think it’s because after doing this series for so long, I worry about repeating myself if I simply report on [...]
This Week In My Classes: The Value of F2F
Last week I cancelled two regular class meetings for my Introduction to Literature Class and instead set up individual conferences, 15 minutes per students. (If you want to do the math, of the 26 registered students 24 ended up meeting with me, so that was six actual contact hours in place of two, and since it [...]
From the Archives: The Last Time I Taught Bleak House…
For some reason this phrase has been running through my head to the tune of “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” I don’t know why I would be feeling nostalgic about teaching Bleak House, though it was rather a while ago–it was Fall 2008, to be precise. Because we’ve started work on it in my 19th-century [...]
Next Week in My Classes: Winter 2013 Term Begins!
The past week has been all about getting organized: packing and cleaning up from Christmas, sorting the kids out to get back to school, and sorting myself out to be ready for the start of winter term classes tomorrow. I wasn’t starting from scratch, happily, but I made some adjustments to my plans for my Introduction [...]
This Week In My Classes: Wrapping Up
The last ten days or so have been all about evaluating the final assignments for my two fall-term classes, Mystery and Detective Fiction and The Somerville Novelists. The students in my Intro to Literature class wrote a last essay for the term too, but that came in earlier and so I was able to turn [...]
This Week In My Classes: Finishing Touches
Today was the last day for my fall term classes, which means the last meeting altogether for two of them. One of them, Introduction to Literature, continues in January, when I will also be adding another round of The 19th-Century Novel from Dickens to Hardy–a very different round, just by the way, from the last [...]
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