Pat returned on the 10th from a week in England. Apart from stacking wood I occupied myself with doing a bit of work on my projected course L’Italia e la letteratura inglese. Prima parte: Boccaccio e Chaucer. Have written the preface to the module booklet and got Fabio to check the grammar. The idea is that I’ll supply all the texts and teaching materials as downloads from my iDisk, thus saving the students the expense of purchasing texts and saving me the cost of printing the module booklet, lecture notes, seminar questions etc. However, whilst Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s texts are available online, Italian translations of Chaucer are not. I’ve therefore had to buy a translation of The Canterbury Tales and am slowly scanning it and using OCR to import it into a document with the Middle English in a facing column. So far I’ve done Chaucer’s Retraction and the first 360 lines of the General Prologue. A long, long way to go.
Still it’s good fun. I always enjoyed putting together my module booklets at Waco and devising socratic questions for the seminars. Whether the course will ever happen is another question. I want to get all the material ready before proposing it to the Pro Loco and had thought of delivering it this winter. Such is the rate of progress, however, that I’m beginning to think next winter is a more likely prospect. If it never happens I will have failed to achieve one objective - improving the fluency of my spoken Italian - but will still have achieved the other: staving off terminal brain-rot. And all without having to write a validation document for College, CAVA or APU, and being completely free of any quality assurance requirements. Teaching nirvana!
Progress on the material can be viewed at:
Using the password: boccaccio
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