Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. John Batchelor, Tennyson: To Strive, To Seek, To Find. London: Chatto and Windus, 2012. 2012 was a good year for biographies. In November I wrote about a new biography of Dickens, discussing it alongside a couple other Dickens biographies that challenge the
This will be my last post for the semester and, appropriately, I’ll use it to talk about finals, and one of the assignments I used in my upper-level class. The major assignment for my Dickens and Childhood class was a pretty standard term paper. But I also asked students to contribute to Wikipedia, an assignment
I give reading quizzes in my classes, at least those classes that consist mostly of freshman and sophomores, or survey classes where part of the point is to read widely. Quizzes provide students with an incentive to do the reading, and they give me a sense of how manageable it is, and what parts of