Target marking

Bit quiet on the blogging front for a while, I know. I’ve been working on one project which is hard to blog, and others where the need has been to produce something specific for a deadline. I’d felt the risk that blogging could be a diversion from work rather than an aid to it, so I knuckled down and just got it done. The other reason for my silence has been that this is the pre-registration week before term begins and that, like academics across the country, I’ve been remembering all the jobs I meant to get done over the summer but haven’t.
Amongst that preparation, things that might be of interest to readers of this blog (I hope you’re both well):
1) encouraging my own first PhD student that he should blog his work (a decision he needs to make for himself, rather than having it forced on him, but at least there’s plenty of good practice to point to).
2) re-writing my ‘Britain in the Second World War’ undergraduate course to include a Clausewitz lecture and seminar. I had to think carefully about where to put this. I don’t think that my classes generally do enough to extend students’ range conceptually, and C von C’s remarkable trinity is a fascinating/useful way to look at WW2 (particularly since one of the themes of the course is the interconnectedness of every aspect of the war). When I taught at Sandhurst, we hit the cadets with Clausewitz early on, then referred back. But they were people with quite a lot (in some cases) of background knowledge about war. I can’t always rely on that broader knowledge with my undergrads. So I’ve put the lecture at the end of the first semester, so that they’ll be able to apply the theory to some examples they already have. I’ll update on progress.
3) converting aspects of my Great War course for use with ‘gifted and talented’ sixth form students in an online study group.
In the next couple of days, I’ll post up this material. And there’s also the details of the War and Memory seminar group that Catherine Merridale and I are starting. And then I’m going to a conference in Dublin which I’ll summarise for y’all. And then I might finally get back to considering the points about the military experience ratio and the Fathers and Sons threads which I’ve been meaning to write up for some time.
Phew.

Fathers and Sons (2)

‘As an only child, his main companion though early childhood was his French grandfather. Soon after his father’s return home from military service in 1922, young Douglas switched allegiance and adopted military dress: with metal buttons, puttees and a medal made out of a halfpenny, he patrolled the garden, challenging all who passed. His infatuation with this colourful, ebullient father, so suddenly returned from the wars, seems to have been intense and from that time his obsession for playing soldiers came near to dominating his life.
Domestic accidents followed which, one imagines, encouraged him to rationalise his emotional investments, reducing them, perhaps, if possible, to something that would fit in a kit bag. When Douglas was four, his mother collapsed with encephalitis. This illness dragged on (and recurred throughout Douglas’s adolescence), the faily smallholding business failed, and on borrowed money Keith was sent, at the age of six, to boarding school. Two years later, his father moved away to North Wales and it soon became clear that he was gone for good.’
Ted Hughes, ‘Introduction’ to D. Graham, ed, Keith Douglas: The Complete Poems, OUP, 1987, xvii.
Fathers and Sons (1)

Fathers and Sons (1)

A Grand Night

When the film Tell England came
To Leamington, my father said,
‘That’s about Gallipoli – I was there.
I’ll call and see the manager…’

Before the first showing, the manager
Announced that ‘a local resident…’ etc.
And there was my father on the stage
With a message to the troops from Sir Somebody
Exhorting, condoling or congratulating.
But he was shy, so the manager
Read it out, while he fidgeted.
Then the lights went off, and I thought
I’d lost my father.
The Expedition’s casualty rate was 50%

But it was a grand night out,
With free tickets for the two of us.’

D.J. Enright (b.1920), Collected Poems, OUP, 1981, 120 (Originally from his The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood, 1973).
My thanks to Professor John Ramsden for pointing this poem out to me.

On blogging (5)

Great post by Sharon Howard on the topic below. Quality discussion demonstrates value of blogging shocker, as the headline should doubtless read.