Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.
It's been a while since I've posted, for which I apologize. One of the things that I promised myself when I started this blog was that I wouldn't write just to write: only when I had something to say that I thought might be interesting to those who might read it. There simply hasn't been much "news" this week to write about. But I am now 3-4 weeks into my teaching, so I can share some better insights about my reactions to teaching in this very different environment.
First, I'll start with what news there is, or isn't. No word from the Foreign Police. They have a month from our submission date (5 October) to respond, so we may not hear from them for another few weeks. We're just keeping our fingers crossed (and our gas tank full in case we need to flee to Croatia).
We had a lovely visit with my sister Pat last week, and her partner John over the weekend. Pat arrived on the train from Vienna on Wednesday late afternoon, and we narrowly averted disaster. Bratislava has two train stations: the main station just north of the old city (hlavná stanica) and another one in the south of the city (stanica petržalka). We had talked with many natives about trains to Vienna and were told that they go out of the Petržalka station, so I assumed that would be where Pat would arrive. I would be going to class at the late-afternoon time of her arrival, so Suzanne would be doing the pickup. We practiced twice how to get to the Petržalka station from our apartment, where to park there, and then how to get to the hotel where Pat would be staying. On the morning of the day she was to arrive, I happened (fortunately) to look online just to see if there was any information about her train. Hmmm, it seems that her train was to arrive at the main station, not Petržalka. Had I not happened to look (for no particular reason) at the train schedule, Suzanne would have been at Petržalka and an undoubtedly panicked Pat would have been at the main train station with no Slovak at all, no cell phone that works in Slovakia, and no one there to pick her up! As is was, all the well-rehearsed directions to and from Petržalka were out the window and Suzanne had to figure out how to get to the main station, where to park, and how to get back to the hotel on her own. Of course, she did perfectly, despite her misgivings and, I´m sure, lots of internal cursing of my original claim that Petržalka was the place to go.
Once we got her picked up, we had a great time with them, visiting a lot of the places in Bratislava and the region that Suzanne and I had enjoyed earlier. The one "adventure" we had during their visit was on Saturday night. There is a TV transmission tower at Kamzík in the hills above Bratislava that is renowned for its view. (Picture below is from Wikipedia; I don't have one as good.)
It has a revolving restaurant that was alleged to serve good food and to provide the very best panorama of the city, so we booked dinner reservations there for Saturday night.
As with the Petržalka train station, we had to practice getting there because we weren't sure of the best route. Well, at least we tried to practice. Let's just say that the practice, ending up time after time on one-lane roads that became one-way down the hill, did not inspire much confidence in our ability to actually make it back up there. So I had it all mapped out and printed out from Google maps because our GPS didn't seem very helpful on the practice run. (GPS is pretty useless in Slovakia because the names of the streets are almost never posted in a visible way; if a marking exists at all, it is a small white sign on the side of a building that you can never find in time to make the turn. It's bad enough that Jill's Australian voice butchers the pronunciation of the Slovak names. But even when we can figure out that she said to "turn left on Bárdošova" there will rarely be a visible sign that will tell us which street is Bárdošova. We have to go by the distances---50 meters to the turn---and just hope we get it right.)
So Saturday evening came along and up we went ... up into the clouds! Late Saturday afternoon a dense fog had settled in above the city. By the time we got halfway up the hill, we could barely see lines on the road (when such existed). When we got to the tower, after a very nervous (but geographically sound!) ascent, you would never have known from the parking lot that there was a tower! We went up the elevator to the "Altitude" restaurant to find that the lovely dining room, with its revolving circle of tables, was completely surrounded by white. We couldn't see the ground below, let alone the city in the valley! Oh well. Dinner was good, and they had a pianist playing in one of the corners of the (square) room outside the revolving circle of tables. We revolved past the piano every hour and he seemed to play "oldies" every time we came by; I guess we must have looked like (and maybe were) the oldest people in the uncrowded dining room.
Pat and John left on Monday morning, so it has been back to the routine of grading homework assignments and preparing for and attending my classes since then. I've been trying to apply the teaching methods that have seemed to work well for me over the years at Reed. I give lots of homework and use the comments as a mechanism for individual intellectual communication with each student. But unlike at Reed, where I never, ever put a numerical or letter grade on a paper, I'm actually (when I remember) putting points on each question for the students.
Apparently the emphasis on comments rather than points is not the norm here. I had an interesting email exchange with one of my masters students. I had forgotten to put the points on the first question of her assignment when I read it, so she wanted to know her score. I responded to tell her the score and to apologize, saying that I was accustomed to a system in which we wrote detailed comments to help students learn but didn't put points on the page. Quoting from her response: "Your system ... is quite different than here in Slovakia. I have never before seen any comments on my homework, thesis, or even tests." Stop for a minute and let that sink in. She is in her fourth year of university study and has never seen a comment written on any of her assignments. Wow!
But she liked the idea of comments very much and went on to say "I guess it costs a lot of your free time." Hmmm. Maybe that's why I don't have any free time (and neither do any of my Reed colleagues)!
I am finding teaching the classes to be quite difficult in some ways. The actual lecturing and, of course, the subject matter, are very easy and familiar. I can switch on my "Romer Chapter 2" lecture and practically do it in my sleep. But as I've mentioned earlier, the classes meet once a week for three hours. It is really quite brutal on the students to try to listen to me for three hours and stay awake. I try to break it up by asking lots of questions (in response to which most of the students just stare at me silently), taking periodic breaks, and reviewing homework, but three hours is a long time. And seven days between classes is a very long time. It's hard to maintain any momentum.
The masters class has presented some interesting issues. These are fourth-year students and there is a real mixture. The class seems to be about 25 students. I say "seems to be" because students that I have written off as having dropped the class have sometimes reappeared after missing a couple of weeks of classes and assignments. A preliminary assessment suggests that there are about 10-15 students who are strongly engaged in the class: attending regularly and working hard on all of the assignments. Then there is a group that are only marginally engaged. These students miss classes, miss assignments, or turn in assignments that are quite poor. A lot of them are looking at their phones in their laps during class or staring at their laptops (which they may or may not be using to take notes). I'm generally inclined to treat the students as adults who are responsible for their own decisions. If they decide that it is not worthwhile to pay full attention during class, then they are either smart enough to learn the material without listening, in which case I can't really fault them, or they are going to do poorly the exams, in which case their grades will reflect their lack of effort. Either way, it's their choice, as long as they do not disrupt their peers. But I miss the Reed students with whom this just doesn't happen!
The PhD class has some different issues. There are about 10 students, of whom about half are economics students and the rest are from various business disciplines and international relations. Pretty much all of them are intimidated by the level of mathematics in the class, and some are really struggling with it. Given the very limited class time, I'm having to omit large sections of what I teach at Reed and trying to focus quite narrowly on the very basic elements of each set of models. They all pay close attention in class, but I get a lot of deer-in-the-headlights stares whenever I ask a question. The last class of the first half is next week, followed by the final exam for the economic growth part of the course the week after. I'm sure that some of the first-half-only students will be glad not to have to spend their Thursday mornings listening to me any more!
This afternoon and early evening we had a city tour and a brew-pub get-together with a remarkably diverse set of international researchers and graduate students organized by Euraxess. At the pub we sat across from an agricultural science PhD student from Uzbekistan, an architecture PhD student from Afghanistan, and a linguistics scholar from Croatia. A few seats down the table were two economists from Ukraine who are in the same building as my office at EUBA, and with whom I hope to connect on campus. And across from them was a Russian economics student who is auditing my PhD course. Interesting evening!
A few weeks ago, I posted something about the tendency of Slovaks to economize on the use of vowels. I'll sign off for tonight with a wonderful example, courtesy of the Croatian linguist, who challenged us to pronounce it: Strč prst skrz krk. A four-word sentence without a single letter we would recognize as a vowel. It means, approximately, "Put a finger through your throat." It seems like you'd have to do exactly that to make it come out right! My best rendering of its pronunciation is "sturch purst skurz kurk," with all of the "r"s rolled aggressively. One more fun-with-consonants adventure, try the verb for "to ignite:" vzbľknuť!
After that mouthful, I can't think of anything else to say, so that's all for now. More next week, or whenever anything happens worthy of passing along.
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