Not In the System

As a "Study Abroad" or "International Student," I am not "in the system." This means many things. First it means that I do not receive the adminstrative emails that help students know that there are Things that Must Be Done. Also, I won't show up on the professors' class lists for a few weeks. This also means that I don't quite know what is expected at any given time, and, because of my accent, I am exempted from a lot of expectations after the double take accompanies acknowledgement of "oh, now I am talking with a foreigner."

Three of the professors am taking courses with are very traditional. Not very approachable and very serious about their work. The History professor, Dr. John Logan, was insistent that I bring a stamped document that indicated that I was enrolled in his course. This confused the International Education Office, but I convinced them this piece of paper would make Dr. Logan very happy. I made sure two people in the office signed it with their phone numbers. When I handed Dr. Logan this piece of paper, he peered at it both through his glasses and over his classes while he bent forward for this inspection of my stamped piece of paper. I am sure it did not make sense as I am equally sure he had never seen this form before, but it DID have the stamp on it, so he allowed me to sign up for a tutorial.

His colleague in the English Department is as serious and imperious. She teaches the literature course that had the "foreigners not welcome" sign on the syllabus. She began the class by informing the students there were too many people in the room, and she hoped half of them would leave because they were probably not prepared for the material. After having said this, she then said this course used to be called "Joyce to Derrida" (read obscure and hard to understand to obscurer and harder to understand) and it would only get about seven people to attend (duh). So her department made her change the course to be a survey of 20th century Anglo Irish literature so it would be able to compete with the science fiction course which was always packed. Well, clearly, from the packed room, the change was quite successful. However, I could not get over the cognitive dissonance of her complaining that there were too many people. Of course, then she began to survey the class about who had read any Joyce before, or who recognized the other authors she was mentioning. More than half of the Irish students had no idea what she was talking about, and the one person who had read several of the authors she was mentioning was an American girl in the back of the room. I was laughing (in my mind). There she was, up on her high horse, all alone except for this really embarassing Yank who read stuff her precious little majors had no clue about. She did seem a bit disoriented by this state of affairs, to her credit, but then overcame her own cognitive dissonance and soldiered on. She had unorganized handouts for only about half the class, couldn't work the computer very well, but did make very interesting points about the general themes that would be covered in the class. I later went to her office hours to ask if I might just sit in on the lectures, and she very nicely said I could. This seems like a good arrangement to me as I would rather just enjoy the lectures and the texts and not worry about working through her expectations of student writing which seem like they would be stressful and hard to guess.

The Irish Language class is the livliest I have been to yet because it is full of people from the Irish Music and Dance program, and these are women my age. Well, you can't get more fun than that! They talk and laugh and participate like nobody's business. The poor adjunct who was running the class didn't know what times the tutorials met or anything. He read the syllabus and left it at that. He couldn't answer any questions, had no phone, and no email. He was wearing a blue faded t-shirt and brown wide-wale courdoroy pants whose cuffs were frayed at the heel. The accordian player behind me thought he was hot stuff and loudly warned all the young ladies across the room to keep their eyes on their note books and not be distracted by the hottie teacher. He turned bright red. It went well with the blue shirt and brown pants. This woman will prove to be a total hoot, I'm sure. The teacher seems inexperienced enough to be very traditional or totally unorthodox. This is supposed to be a conversation class, so it will be interesting to see where he will fall on the teaching spectrum.

Wednesday night I signed up for two student clubs: aikido and Outdoor Pursuits. The student club life here is very active and all the student clubs had turned out, in appropriate costumes, to recruit members on the basket ball courts of the university sports arena. Judo guys and Shotokan karate guys were out on some wrestling mats taking on all comers in little matches. Each club had a little booth and little registration cards. If they were really into it, they had props like boats or tents or these little wrestling matches. The skydiving club had hung a parachute over their booth, and some club had a guy dressed up like a devil (pitchfork, horns, cape, fangs) walking around putting red pieces of paper in people's hands. I don't know what he was promoting, but he really had the looming over victims act down well. The saddest booth was the chess club. It was just a booth with a chess set and a silent, motionless person sitting behind it. No decorations, nothing: just a hand-lettered sign that said "Chess Club". I did not see any one sign up for chess, probably because the pen sitting beside their sign up book had no ink cartridge in it: it was only a plastic pen shell. It was so poignant.