The students struggled this morning (as did Mama, as their lecturer, to be honest). They are only first year literature students (in the first semester of their degree), but alongside their primary texts are required to read theories of gender, post-structuralism, new historicism and postcolonialism, with reference to the work of Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Louis Althusser etc.

Today was Michel Foucault, whose work is superb. However, trying to cram Discipline and Punish, Panopticism and Power, Madness and Civilization into a one hour seminar was a bit of a challenge. I think I may have broken their brains...I also may have broken mine trying to plan that lesson.

Izzy has the right idea; she came in from the garden with her hands covered in mud and annouced 'making magic patterns now', and proceeded to cover Foucault's theories with her muddy fingerprints :)