And I’m not yet back in the habit of writing a blog post on a Friday afternoon. But yesterday I’d have been a bit busy – I was marking essays for the PGCert course I’ve been teaching and then in the evening I was singing in a concert with The Valley Singers in Hurst Green. It’s nice to be back singing again. I joined the choir in mid January when I decided that I needed to do something for me, that wasn’t work-related. The concert included all sorts of material, from O Fortuna and Bruckner’s Locus Iste to Goldfinger and When I’m 64 – even the Ning Nang Nong! As well as singing with the choir, I also performed a solo – Vilia from Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow. It seemed to go down quite well, which was nice as it’s some years since I’ve sung anything other than Tudor ballads in public!

Okay, so no one looks at their best mid-song!!! And I’ve no idea what the 3 blue UFOs are…

Thursday I spent on campus, partly because I had a meeting to sort out some aspects of the Social History Society Conference but mainly because we had a lunch to welcome the new colleagues in the department and to say farewell to another who’s going on leave. It was really, really nice to see people back in the department and catch up with some people who I’ve not seen for years, or even never met!

Wednesday I spent at home, working on my marking and more Social History Society stuff, but Tuesday was really special – it was the final class of my special subject, Fake News or Fact? We had a PhD student observing the class which was interesting. I gave a short lecture on revision – an updated version of the lecture that I give the second years on Making Modern Britain. What I like about it is that it gives the students some models of how to deal with primary and secondary source material in an exam situation- practical examples of how to use the sources that they’ve read. They seem to appreciate it anyway. And then I got them to try to identify the main themes of the course, and what questions might come up on the exam. This is useful because it gets them to think about the sorts of things we’ve discussed and how that might be reflected in the exam.

As well as doing some fairly standard revision work, I asked them to bring along something that they had baked that related to the themes of the course. Daft as this might seem, it does help them to think about the important aspects of the course. The idea was that they explained their bakes to me, or an invited audience if they turned up. I invited the rest of the staff along, and a couple brought their special subject students along to listen. Quite a few of the PhD students came along to listen and sample the cakes too. I was really impressed at the effort – one had made cupcakes with musical notation on top to point out the role of music in ballads; one had made a brownie iced with a woodcut to illustrate the important of the visual; and another had made coffee(house) cupcakes iced with different types of news media. My contribution was the Sussex dragon – a snake wearing a pair of dragon wings and reading a pamphlet – to illustrate the lengths to which news media went to persuade an early modern readership of the truth of their reports.

It’s been a real pleasure teaching them this year – they are a lovely bunch and we’ve had some excellent discussions along the way. It was also nice to see some of the students in the other Specials that I haven’t seen since first year! I’m going to miss teaching them on a Tuesday morning, although I think I’m seeing them again this week for their academic tutorials.