Almost halfway through: putting the "ache" in "teacher"

Thought I’d cobble together a blog post out of some recent e-mails.  I’m halfway through the actual course meetings now, thanks to Raquel’s three-day-weekend-oriented schedule, and unlike many other evenings I do not have papers to mark: I asked for journal pages (photocopied) preferably today, but of course everyone took the opportunity to turn them in tomorrow even with no advantage.  As with other manifestations of student behavior I have to work pretty hard to avoid personalizing that kind of thing.  I’ll head back to the Foyer tomorrow and hope that there are at least some photocopies in the folder I left for them in the beautiful library-with-view-of-the-Eiffel-Tower where I spend quite a bit of time.

For awhile it looked as if I had spoken too soon about the peacefulness of this apartment, but the bad news is mingled with good: the other day Ion my way out I encountered Yuri in the chambre next to mine, did a bit of manly-man bonding about the dust and cleanup onus of demolition, and I took the risk of asking very politely whether he could do his fumer-ing in the room and not in the couloir, because I was sensitive to smoke.  He ruefully shook his head, took out a stick of gum and said, "C'est fini" at which I gave him a big handshake and bravo-chapeau affirmation of good a thing that was and how hard, but that he would succeed.  So.  We will see, but I call that a frickin' good omen.  The only time this place smells a bit like an ashtray is when I have windows open on both sides, and someone downstairs decides to smoke, which is less often than at other places I’ve been.

The course seems to be going fine, though as always one never can be sure. It’s all too easy to recall the debacle in Oxford 2011--though I don't seem to have as toxic a Tweeter as I had back then, nor do I have so many people born without the enzyme needed to metabolize irony.  I just today turned back marked Monday’s midterm-first-papers (with grades, which probably were be a shock to some) after a week of just doing informal journal-writing in blue books and making quick comments.  On Tuesday and Wednesday I had pushed hard on the Henry James close-reading, making sure that they actually got what was going on.  I had heard vague murmurs of discontent about the fact that I devoted an hour of lecture to some grammatical terminology review, confirming in the process that even some of the most voluble of discussion participants actually have no clue about the nitty gritty of narrative voice, person, tense etc, and that if (as I hope to do) we will look at the very different ways the different authors present Paris and their experiences using very different technical apparatus, these student should actually be able to be more precise than "It's like, you know, sort of 'you,' you know? Like, Hemingway goes, 'you are sitting in the cafe,' and, like, we are with him, like almost."  

As I’ve noted with other classes, the science-y folks are usually not the problem, it’s the self-appointed Literati that often have grotesquely exaggerated views of their own sophistication.  My Hermione Granger is no exception, but there are several others for whom glibness and lit-crit jargon have substituted for rigor and clarity their entire academic lives—they all passed out of having to take a writing class, god forbid—and they can be jaw-droppingly clueless about decoding complex prose or reading like a professional, much less expressing themselves coherently about how a text works.  Yesterday's discussion launched from some passage work on Henry James' Madame de Mauves (which I had not read before, scandalously)--it's always a good idea to ensure against the ghastly silence when one tries to discuss a work as a whole when only a few have read all of it--and then this morphed into an excellent session on cultural differences & expectations as regards expats / travellers / tourists, with melting-pot vs tossed-salad thrown in as I brought up Brexit / nationalism / Trumposities as well.  You can never predict it but sometimes magic happens.  I'm exhausted from conducting that little symphony, but hey.  I think they themselves were stunned at how the pronouncements of the characters about what it means to be American (to the French) and vice versa are still potent today.  

On the down side, I’m a little freaked that one of my interlocutors may have taken my Socratic / rhetorical persona too literally when I was pushing them about the limits of embracing diversity (honey, do you really think I am equating the headscarf with genital mutilation? or stoning? But I have to say, if you don't see a continuum you are not looking.  And let's leave religion out of this, there's plenty of behaviors / mores / "rights" that might be perfectly acceptable in a home country that one should probably be expected to curtail when one goes to another country to live semi permanently).  A couple of folks got on their soapboxes and started lecturing the class even as I was attempting to show the absurdity of these Diversity Brainwashings when you butt right up against “this-far-and-no-farther.” UC Davis pays several Vice Chancellors For Diversity a quarter million dollars a year to encourage everyone to sing Kum-Ba-Ya and wring our hands about grafitti—it’s great though, to see that the Kool-Aid has been drunk by a few of them.  I love being patronized by 20-year-olds who still don't know the difference between it's and its.

Then today, there were Awkward Moments as I tried to get them to focus on the last four or five pages of the novella.  To prime the pump for discussion I had them re-read (let’s be honest—for many, read-for-the-first-time) the passage, keeping in mind several key technical aspects: time-cues, point of view shifts, play-acting, characters’ reading others’ moods / non-verbal cues, and the theme of competition.  Two of them stared off into space for five minutes and then started looking through a guidebook and writing in another journal.  This after I had a week before made very clear, “If I give you fifteen minutes for something, there’s a reason.  If you finish early and stare into space, you are sending a signal to me that says, ‘I disrespect you and the task you set, I am so brilliant that I can extract and express everything that is possible, in half the time you think it needs, and I will share that sentiment of disrespect with the rest of the class by ostentatiously advertising my superiority and ennui.’”  Or words to that effect.

So pretty soon as I am pulling teeth to get the discussion rolling (thinking to myself, is this nasty fallout after yesterday’s discussion? Or is it just that another group of students took advantage of the pre-July 1 low online rates (35 euro instead of 90!) to spend too much time at EuroDisney and they are simply brain dead?) I get “Well, I don’t see competition at all, between the Baron and Longmore.”  I stop.  What do I do with this?  I ask for clarification.  Another one joins in, with the implication that my question about competition is I guess just some bizarre imposition of my interpretation.  In my head I hear my wife’s pleading tones as I enter a dinner-party fray: “use your teacher voice, sweetie” which is code for “I don’t want to duck and cover as you over-react to some imagined provocation.”  So I proceed calmly, reasonably, without too much of the I’ll-keep-one-wit-hand-tied-behind-my-back-to-keep-it-a-fair-battle tone to it, to read the very following passage aloud:

Longmore had dark blue eyes, of admirable lucidity,—truth-telling eyes which had in his childhood always made his harshest taskmasters smile at his nursery fibs.  An observer watching the two men, and knowing something of their relations, would certainly have said that what he saw in those eyes must not a little have puzzled and tormented M. de Mauves.  They judged him, they mocked him, they eluded him, they threatened him, they triumphed over him, they treated him as a pair of eyes had never treated him…

What do you think, dear reader?  Is the competition between these two characters all in my mind? There’s something about “triumphed over him” that gives me a clue.  Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Of course I am constantly stunned by folks' willingness to believe utter fantasies even as they maintain a pose of ironic superiority.  The day before, my students had sort of scoffed at Euphemia's romantic idealizations of aristocratic French matches, saying no one could be that naive, yet when I walked them through the Trump "logic" of "getting those manufacturing jobs back from China," they couldn't deny that such fallacies are just as ludicrous ("Attention WalMart shoppers, we're going to only sell Made In The USA merchandise now, so either you cough up triple the price, or you find a whole buttload of people to sign up to work for the five bucks a day and a bowl of rice, or whatever.")  Yes, we had brought up the Brexit vote, which most of them knew precious little about (a place for a couple of econ majors to outshine the Obliverati.

The whole episode today left me weary, weary, weary, and glad for some time off.  I didn’t even make them journal on the prompt, “At its heart, James’ novella presents an elaborate fantasy of American moral victory over French perfidy.”  We moved on to Gertrude Stein…

So that’s where I’m livin’ at the moment.  Time to make a little dinner and watch Poland play Portugal in the Euro Cup quarterfinals…

First week of classes, a good start

I'm typing this Friday, from high atop the Foyer International, looking out over the rooftops past the Eiffel Tower to the odd skyscraper-thicket of La Defense.  I’m holding extra office hours here on a non-class day, having survived my first week of classes in pretty good form.

The group seems congenial, and so far at least they are buying what I am selling on multiple levels—though I know from somewhat brutal experience (cf Oxford 2011) that It Can Blow At Any Seam.  Not to say I’ve not had a couple of curve balls thrown—it wouldn’t be a Summer Abroad experience without them—but I feel good about the class qua class and qua group: they are responding intelligently to the readings (both on paper, and the greater “reading” of the city that I am trying to foment through the experiential directives), and I am not picking up much in the way of cliquishness or exclusivity as has occurred with a couple of the trips in the past.  It’s kind of amusing to hear them say, “That new group of students from Michigan—they are LOUD!  I see what you mean, John.”  The proof of the pudding, of course, will be to survive weekends when the temptation to party down gets too much to resist.

One curve ball is that my otherwise pretty quiet apartment turns out to be right next door to a major remodeling project that started… Monday morning.  This being an ancient building, the first step is demolition of old plaster and major wall-knocking, with the ouvrier Yuri pounding away with a sledge starting at 8:15 one morning.  That’d be bad enough, but until I can communicate successfully, he seems to be taking his smoke breaks in the couloir a meter from my (trapezoidal) front door, which is, as the Brits would say, “Dashed bad luck old boy.”  Luckily I have places to retreat to.

The class has a mix of abilities and talkativeness, and I am attempting to quash the over-eager one without being too brutal; at least she is semi-aware of it, and I have broken out my “you don’t need to raise your hand, you can be my go-to person in case the discussion flags” routine out of my Cagey Veteran Teacher toolbox.  Even so, she is the person who as regular as clockwork will jump ahead while I am discussing item 2 in a list, and ask a question about item 4, necessitating Zen Teacher calm after awhile, both to keep myself from snapping at her and to stave off the eye-rolling from the rest of the class, which she acknowledges her propensities have tended to earn her in the past.

As I did last year I am working hard at butterfly-check-ins with as many individuals as possible, again both for the positive and to prevent the negative (if an instructor is seen to be talking too frequently to this person or that, then expect “he played favorites” on the evals).  The in-class journaling that I do helps to facilitate good rapport right out of the chute, and with only 18 students I have much less of a struggle reading and making comments each day, and handing back their in-class blue-books the next day.  It’s such an interesting balance to strike: there are a handful of students who really appreciate some of the writing advice and grammar nomenclature that I am trying to slot in quickly at the beginning, and others who want me to lecture more about the readings or provide lots of background history.  Next week will be crucial, I think.  There wasn’t as much push-back against the Jefferson readings as I expected (maybe because R had made some cuts from years past), but as we move into Henry James’ Madame de Mauves things may get more difficult.  I also have one student whose journal entries are so different from everyone else’s that I wonder if I have a genius or a nut-case on my hands.  Maybe both…

Yesterday we had our first field trip of the course, which had already been booked by the time I had come on.  I had thought originally that it was a bad idea, but I see it is genius both in its placement and in its target: we “did” Versailles (palace only) and Giverny on the same day, leaving on a bus from in front of the hostel at 9 and returning by 6.  Now, I know that two hours and a quarter is too little a time for either of these sites, but there’s genius to it, too: we could join the conga lines, do our audioguide thing through the palace, and then reassemble at the top of the garden to return to the coach, and then leave the gardens and Trianon for another trip without the palace; since they would be receiving 6-day Paris Museum Passes (good for Versailles) and since they have Navigo passes that get them almost to V (or possibly all the way—the vendor who brought them may have paid for Zone 5 but I have to check), the garden and Trianons can be a separate outing at no extra cost to them, but they have a context for the readings and so on.  Then to continue on to Giverny—which is much less accessiible by public transit—and visit a very different locus of French cultural capital, joining a different conga line, makes perfect sense, especially since the topic of Wednesday’s in-class journaling was GK Chesterton’s “A traveller sees what he sees, a tourist sees what he is told to see.”

I have to admit that every field trip is fraught with peril for me as a leader, and the discrepancy between participant and soi-disant-responsable is never greater than when the students are milling around waiting to be shunted and I am churning over how / when / where to shunt.  Gauging how reliable they will be for rendezvous time, calibrating how explicit to be about meet-up points (“Take a look backwards.  Do you see what this path to the coach parking looks like from the direction you are likely to be coming at 4 o’clock? Good.”), and anticipating which of innumerable foulups will occur—all of these things help make me a bit less tolerant of dopey comments or complaints, yet I have been getting more skilled at forewarning about these things (“Just so you know, on field trip days, be aware that your question might be super-important to you at that particular time, but it is probably not the most important thing for me.  So don’t take it personally if I defer it til later”).  

This particular trip featured three interesting fillips: I had gotten the cell phone number of Dans the driver early that morning and it seemed like a lot of digits.  Turns out it was a Latvian number—who knew that 371 was the country code for Latvia?  Not me.  Without a 00 in front of it, sna marsh paw.  But he called me and all was fine.  Second thing was, Dans looked completely blank when I said hello and started talking French.  Uh-oh, what Amelie calls my guerilla-French (and I call my gorilla-French) must be even less comprehensible than I thought.  No, he wants English.  Turns out his French is worse than mine.  And his English is worse than my French.  And he seems to have never heard of Giverny.  No matter, he can look it up in his GPS while we do the palace.  All this is established as we punch through traffic, admire the parking lot on the peripherique going the other way, and try to communicate that due to a general strike threatened.

So then we get to Versailles and it looks as if they are letting tourists in.  I have to decide how much time will be necessary to make our 13:50 time at Giverny, but I don’t know how long it’ll take, since I don’t have A Mep and I just have my recollection from a week before of looking at ‘em on a big map back home.  I figure an hour fifteen max, and arbitrarily set a 12:20 rendezvous time.  We’re dropped off (I am giving the dude a big shine by not having him park in the bus parking—he gets to pocket the extortionate parking fee that they probably gave him to pay)—and he goes to a rest stop outside of town to hang for a couple hours and reset his GPS, 

Here comes curveball number three: While I’m finalizing with Dans, I have a student distribute tickets and she informs me that we’re two short.  Merde.  Brandon and Caroline have no tickets.  They are printed with names, arriving in two batches from our vendor, and of course I am blaming myself for somehow spacing out in the printing process or checking that they were all there.  [It doesn’t occur to me that only 17 were sent, and I did not catch the shortage.]  On the way up the cobblestones to the first of the two lines, a resuming-student who just visited Versailles with her family a few days before volunteers to give up her ticket to Caroline, and I give mine to Brandon—“Yeah he really looks like a Stenzel doesn’t he?” and we briefly debate re-assembling all the sheets and handing them in in a sheaf.  It could work, but it’s a risk I would rather not take, betting that thet won’t cross check names.  Lisa then heads across to the ticket office and buys a couple at full retail, ouch, and I hold our place in the second line, rejoining the group just after the headset disbursement.  Simple solution…

The rest of the day worked fine—the kids underestimated how long it’d take them to get to the bus, justifying my call on the timing, and we got to Giverny just in time.  Bummer that we couldn’t stop for food, but I told em about the options for afterward, and a good time was had.  Giverny was a bit of a mosh pit with several groups of schoolkids and the usual crush of other tourists and Monet-foamers.  Yet even that was great: look at where these kids are being taken—how many California students get taken to some artist’s monument?  Not many, and a bunch of my students got this.

OK I have to wrap this up—it’s evening, and the news about Brexit and the financial semi-meltdown has depressed me somewhat.  Well, a lot.  But after some excellent talks with students up on the terrace, and a trip to the grocery on my way home,  I took a good jog all the way up to Sacre Coeur and back this evening, and I feel better.

And any way you slice it: the place is pretty damned amazing.  I'll take some pictures of this apartment and environs soon.

John's Impromptu Paris Adventure Begins: 2016

Another foreign adventure begins.  I am comfortably ensconced in the rented apartment (I confess I take a different trajectory to it each time, which will continue for awhile as I get accustomed to the little warren of streets only a block or so from the Seine) and I had a good meeting with a couple of the Foyer Internationale staff yesterday afternoon after shooting over from Brussels, where I had some sweet time with brotha Julius and the girls, just as I'd hoped.  The train was a half hour late, which only meant that I had a bit more time to yak with J, and then it was a fast hour and a half straight to Paris-Nord.  The attacks of the past year manifested themselves in National Police i.d. checks on the train, and comically-youthful dudes with berets, flak-jackets and AR-15s serving as A Presence in the stations.

I seriously cannot believe how quiet this place is, even with windows open.  It’s a single room, but a big room, and because there are windows (dormers) on both sides, it feels more spacious than it is.  Because it’s at the very top of a listed building (the narrow stairs to the 3eme are historic, comically so), there are immense beams visible, though the decor is comfortably spare and modern, and the walk under the roof to get to the door is distinctly unprepossessing).  I don’t think I’ll be undertaking any gourmet meals here in the galley-kitchen, but I’ve made strong coffee, eaten some yogurt, and can whip up omelettes or simple meals without a problem.  Pictures will follow.

The weather is gray and the Parisians are fed up with it, but last night after dinner with Natacha near the Hotel de Ville, the slanting  sunlight turned things to magic and on the bridge we passed a guy proposing, I suppose European style (they had a stroller), getting off his knees and slipping a ring onto her finger.  It was literally happening just as we walked by, one of those strange and wonderful encounters straight out of a movie.  

The river is still so high that the bateaux-mouches are not yet running.  I haven’t walked or run the esplanades yet, but from the bridge that N and I crossed you could see the water lapping just a foot below what is normally a sizable drop—if you did as the Parisian young’uns do and hung your feet over as you sipped your wine, they’d be soaked.  That said, I’ll take this over oppressive heat, at least for a while.

Yesterday afternoon on my walk-around at the Foyer I had a pleasant contact with one of the directrices, who seemed impressed both by my attempts at French and by my apparent willingness to play ball with them in terms of enforcing the rules of the place.  The key will be to clarify to these kids that this is a residence and not a hotel, and to really set the tone early and often that the lamentably common Lumpen-behavior of American Students Abroad just won’t cut it.  I’ll be doing my orientation this afternoon (I’ve already had a message from one student with a missed flight) and passing along these and other Uncle Charles policies, before doing a bit of a walk-around in the exquisitely touristique ‘hood along the Boulevard St Michel between the Luxembourg Gardens and Notre Dame.

OK that is my allotted time, and Peregrinator gets rolling again.  Though this course won’t have as many moving parts as the Grand Tour, there are still myriad details to work through, not to mention a constant impetus to read and inform myself about the subject matter so that I am not winging it academically!