Time for class

Bratislava, Sunday 4 October

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

Deportation Update: Things are looking more promising. The amazing Minnesotans managed to get our corrected, certified, and "apostilled" marriage certificate here in four working days. Huge thanks again to the Wadena clerk of court's office, the Minnesota secretary of state's office, and Steve and Lois Parker in Minneapolis. We found out about the problem on Thursday and got the new documents the following Wednesday morning. Everything is now ready for submission. The office that is coordinating the submission will have someone standing in line for us at 5am on Monday. (She thinks that colder weather will shorten the line, so she won't have to get there at 3am as has sometimes been the case.) We will join her in line at 7:20, awaiting the 8:00 opening of the Foreign Police. We hope to be in the first 10 or so in line so that we can get processed within an hour or two. Then it's a few weeks' wait until we find out whether we actually get our permit cards. We are so glad to have reached this stage on time that we haven't even thought about the next stage.

Despite that fact that most of my time since we arrived has been spent just figuring out how to live in Bratislava, I am officially here to teach two macro classes and do research on regional unemployment rates. One of the classes, for their masters students (really 4th year college students), meets on Wednesdays from 5pm to 8pm. The class list suggested 37 students enrolled, but 12 of them did not show up for the first class (and 4 who were not on the list did). The group was quite a bit smaller the second week, so I expect it will settle around 20-25. That's a little bigger than a typical Reed class, but not enormous. The class time is supposed to be 90 minutes of lecture and 90 minutes of seminar. But in practice it's going to be 180 minutes varying freely between lecture, discussion, and students presenting their homework problems. The first week went fine, except that the students (and I) were totally exhausted well before the end of three hours.

For the second week, Suzanne made her wonderful chocolate chip cookies, which were a hit and helped with blood-sugar levels when I handed them out at the break. But the students (and I) were still pretty tired toward the end. I'm now halfway through grading the first problem set. Some of the students are doing very well; others less so. The overall experience of teaching here is not so much different from classes at Reed (or at Houston in the 1980s). The students seem to appreciate my feedback a lot, though, as I don't think they are used to the kind of detailed comments that Reed faculty write on student assignments.

The PhD class met for the first time on Thursday morning: 9 to 12:15 with a 15 minute break. Same plan: officially 90 minutes of lecture and 90 minutes of seminar, but it ends up being three hours of a mixture of formats. There are about a dozen students in the PhD class.

The PhD class is an unusual (to me) registration arrangement. First, the class only meets for eight sessions: 24 actual hours of classes. This is less than half the class time that I have for macro at Reed (52 hours), and yet I'm trying to cover most of the same textbook. It's going to be difficult to get through all of that material in such a small amount of class time. I'm already going through my Reed notes and figuring out what I can cut altogether, what they can (try to) learn on their own, and what is really, truly essential to discuss in class.

Second, there are students in the class from non-economics departments who only need to take half of the class (12 hours of class time over four Thursdays). We've arranged the class as four weeks of economic growth, then four weeks of business cycles, so the half-term students can take either half. We'll see how this goes. I keep reminding myself that I can only do what the constraints of their program allow me to do, but I fear that frustration will set in soon because I always want all of my students to learn everything!

Not surprisingly, the physical classrooms are very different from the Reed norm. No "conference rooms" here with carpeting and soft chairs. The masters' classroom is larger, but both have the same arrangement: a lecture hall with straight rows of desks and fold-down, wooden seats, tiered upward from the stage to the back. The larger room would probably hold about 80 students (and there is a door at the top that opens onto the floor above). The seats are wood and not padded, which must be very uncomfortable on the derriere for three hours. (I asked the students the first night if the seats were as uncomfortable as they looked, and they said that they definitely were!)

The large building in which my office and classrooms are located has a glassed-in booth in the lobby that is staffed by one or two "building monitors." (That's the best description I can think of for them, but I don't know what they are officially called.) Both classrooms have computer projectors, but you have to go to the monitor station to check out the remote control, the cable, and markers and chalk, all in a metal suitcase with the room number in big letters on the side. My most helpful colleague Daniel Dujava is sitting in on the masters class. (He says that he is teaching the Slovak language version and is interested in comparing my approach with what he does. Or maybe he is just so worried about what might happen in my classroom that he wants to be there to avert disaster!) It was a great help to have him there to get the equipment for me and show me how to set it up.

On Thursday, when I showed up (without Daniel's supporting presence) to the PhD class, the room was locked. I knew where to go for help, but there was a lot of improvised sign language trying to communicate with the men at the monitor booth. Finally I wrote the room number on a piece of paper and used my hand to demonstrate turning a key, they figured out what I needed and obliged with a key (and the suitcase containing the projector remote and other equipment) and collected my signature on a sheet in case I decided to abscond with the remote or the key.

I guess that the biggest surprise about the teaching so far is how similar it is to all of the other teaching that I have done. I'm focusing on speaking slowly, on using European rather than American examples, on avoiding slang and jargon, and on all the other things that might help me be understood. But really, they seem to be understanding the lectures as well as Reed students do, so my job in class so far hasn't been a lot different than what I do when I teach these courses at home.

Perhaps the biggest difference has been in the homework answers: not whether the answer is right or wrong but rather the style of the answer. Reed students understand implicitly that when I ask a question, they should not just provide the simple answer to the question but that they should use the question as an opportunity to support their answers with a detailed explanation of the underlying theories. I've tried to be pretty explicit about this in the homework here (for example, adding Explain. or Why? to the end of the question), but there are some students who still don't give me the analytical answer I seek. For example, when I presented them with the six different measures of the unemployment rate published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and asked why economists might be interested in the alternative measures, one student  responded (paraphrasing) "because they all measure a different aspect of unemployment." I guess I need to be even more explicit. ("For each alternative measure, explain in detail how an economist or a policymaker might use the information that this variant provides.") Good lessons for me in being careful about how I ask questions!

I haven't really gotten launched on my research activities yet, but I'm close. The first task is to locate experts on the labor market and unemployment in the region. I have a few leads and will begin following them up this week now that classes seem to be under control. The university is so fragmented that it is likely that the people who do work closest to mine are located in another department. I am in the Katedra ekonomickej teórie, or Department of Economic Theory, whereas the labor economists are in the Katedra sociálneho rozvoja a práce, or Department of Social Development and Labour. Both are administratively in the Faculty of National Economy and they are just a floor below us in the same building, so it shouldn't be too difficult to connect.

Four museums in a day

This morning we headed out on a museum tour of Bratislava. We hadn't yet explored many of the local tourist attractions within the old city, so we started out at the Clock Museum located in an old house on the side of the castle hill. It has a wonderful collection of clocks, both from a decorative perspective and from the functional side. Here is a representative selection of the clocks and watches, all made by Bratislava artisans over the centuries.

One of the most beautiful clocks

A combination of four hour glasses. How did this work?

Note the real clock at upper right in the church's clock tower

After the clocks, we had a quick lunch at what has become one of our favorite old-city restaurants, a place called Re-Fresh, where they speak both English and vegetarian. (We initially found them from their sign in front, which says "Vegan, Vegetarian, Meat-Eater? You can all eat together here!") Then it was on to the Wine Museum on the main square in the city. This was a small display, but an interesting one, featuring the stories of the two most prominent historical wine families in Slovakia, the Hubert family (which "still" makes really good sparkling wine) and the Palugyay family, whose winery assets were sold off in the 20th century.

 

Pozsony and Pressburg are "Bratislava" in Hungarian and German

Medals won by Hubert sparkling wine from 1825

The wine museum is attached to a museum of period furnishings in the Apponyi House, the palace of a leading noble Hungarian family, which was very pleasant. But none of the furnishings in the Apponyi House are original and after touring the Červerý Kameň castle, which has largely original furnishings, the marginal value added was not large.

Finally, we went through the City History Museum of Bratislava. This museum contains lots of artifacts from the history of Bratislava since 1200. One observation from this museum: Slovak history seems to end in 1918 with the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. There is very little about the inter-war period when it was part of Czechoslovakia, absolutely nothing about 1939-45 when it was a Nazi puppet state, and nothing at all about the Communist era. Unlike Germany, Slovakia has not yet faced up to regretful aspects of its past. As of now, there does not seem to be a "holocaust museum" or "museum of Communism" here. It will be interesting to watch how much Slovakia's attitude toward these periods change over the next few decades as the more recent episodes become "history."

Tomorrow is our big day: 7am to register the Foreign Police. If things don't go well, I'll probably post again tomorrow just to vent my frustrations! If things go smoothly, it will be longer. My sister Pat arrives for a visit on Wednesday, so I'll be busy late in the week and you might not hear from me again until Sunday or Monday. But if you don't see a post, it probably means that all is well! Until them, dovidenia!