The Long Eighteenth

← Raymond Williams and T.S. Eliot on the “Whole Way of Life” End of the novel course →

End of Term?

May 6, 2007 · 3 Comments

Hello folks,

 I’m back in Shady Side, MD, on some family business.  Sorry I haven’t been able to post lately.  In the meantime, why don’t you let us know how your semester turned out, and where you’re headed to for the summer?

Best wishes,

DM

Categories: David Mazella

3 responses so far ↓

  • Carrie Shanafelt // May 10, 2007 at 6:47 pm

    It seems the spring semester just weighs heavier than other times of the year. I look forward to crawling out from under the piles and jumping back in here again with both feet.

    My summer plans include teaching my entire Renaissance-to-Modernism British Lit survey in 4 weeks (!!!), followed by two whole months of nothing but getting the dissertation happening.

    I should also mention here that Broadview Press is looking for people to write 6-15 page teaching guides for an instructor’s-only website they are releasing in tandem with the new edition of their British Lit anthologies. They are looking for people to cover everything from medieval to current authors, and will pay a $500 sum for the materials.

    The teaching guides seem rather fun to put together, a mixture of discursive annotations and ideas for classroom framing devices, activities, and assignments. (I’m doing the Swift one!) If you’re interested in seeing the lists of authors they’re looking to cover, I would be happy to pass information along to my contacts there.

  • sharon // May 11, 2007 at 7:25 am

    Ah, no teaching in my job so semesters (and ong summer breaks… ;) are something of an abstract concept for me now.

    What our programmers and I will be attempting to do in the next couple of months is take a bunch of transcribed 18th century documents and teach a machine how to recognise personal names, dates, occupations and places. It’s not easy. We’re doing well on the personal names (by using an existing database of names from the Old Bailey Proceedings) and OKish on dates, but the other two might not work at all. Which would mean even more work for the human staff on the project. Plus I have to write a set of guidelines for them to do it with.

    (And I really really am going to try to post something here about the project this summer.)

  • David Mazella // May 11, 2007 at 3:51 pm

    Carrie,

    So the teaching guide is keyed to the new Broadview Brit lit anthology. How does the anthology look, esp. in regard to Rest/18c selections?

    In some ways, summer courses, esp. surveys, make the whole notion of coverage absurd anyway, so I’ve actually found them liberating. What’s not liberating is the grading/teaching crunch, esp. when you’re meeting multiple days a week. Good luck w/the diss, though.

    Sharon,

    Glad to hear from you. Please do tell us about this project, when you get a chance.

    DM

Leave a Comment