on’t forget this is Argentina, a state university, miserable salaries, hundreds of thousands of students (300,000 students at the University of Buenos Aires), old buildings, etc.

Of course we love it, that’s why we do it. Last Friday the Teachers Unions were on strike and we decided to support the strike since at the end, it is for a better education to everyone, for us, for the students.

Despite our support for the strike, we decided to have class anyway, but a different type of class than normal. We had the students bring in their first assignment TP 1 (Trabajo Práctico 1/Practical Work 1): The finished monogram with a series of variations and a grid. After receiving all the works the students were going to have a theoretical class with slides to learn about the next assignment.

Due to the strike we decided to go to school and receive the works, after that we stayed working on the results of TP 1 and the head of Type 2 gave a little talk to the students explaining what the strike was about.

Here’s how we grade:

First, all the teachers get together with the head and establish the parameters for the grades. From those parameters, each teacher sets the standard for their group (remember that we are 5 groups of 33 students & 2 teachers to each group). Then we compare each group’s standards with each other and set the grading structure.

This is one of those times when I wished I lived in Dublin rather than Buenos Aires: the National Library of Ireland has an exhibition celebrating the life and works of William Butler Yeats. It looks to be quite an event. It’s billed as the “biggest exhibition devoted to Yeats and his work ever mounted in Ireland.”

Works and Days is the book to accompany the Yeats exhibition: “The focus of the book, brought together by three of the Yeats Exhibition’s curators, is on the life of W.B. Yeats. It presents a succinct account of his works and days, richly illustrated with photographs and reproductions of paintings, manuscripts and books, many drawn from the National Library’s Yeats Collection.”

There is also a DVD with 4 films that “contain rare archive footage and interviews with major artists and many of the great Yeats scholars to provide an illuminating look at four crucial aspects of Yeats’ life and work, as well as also giving viewers an insight into Irish social, cultural and political life from the late 1800s to the 1930s.”

There’s not really much available online from this exhibition but there is a fascinating video discussing Sailing to Byzantium that will delight anyone interested in poetry and the writer’s process. I would like to see more discussions of literature like this on the net.

And, finally, since this is a book design blog, the exhibition offers an e-card that with the cover of the The Tower (1928) designed by T.S. Moore.