Starting classes

The first day of classes was highly entertaining. When I start my RWC classes that I teach, I hand out the syllabus, which outlines everything up front, and get right into the core ideas and basic concepts of what the class is about. Things are different here. In two classes, only a lecture topic outline and reading list were handed out, and the lecturer read the text of the handout. Boring presentation. However the content was great so the utterly uninvolving technique was ignorable. On the other hand, the third course was presented by a master, in great contrast to the frist two.

The folklore course is taught by an adjunct who plays the uilleann pipes. She was clearly interested in the topic and at one point told an interesting anecdote about fairy trees. Evidently they re-routed a motorway north of Dublin to avoid cutting down a fairy tree because if they did, there would be all these people dead in accidents on this stretch of motorway. Oddly enough, she told this anecdote after asserting that nobody believes in fairies anymore.

The English lit course, “The Irish Literary Revival,” is taught by an earnest, highstrung young man who wears expensive Italian shoes. He outlined his expectations for the students. The first one was that we should be “respectful of others.” When he elaborated, it turned out that respect meant silence during lectures. As if on cue, a cell phone went off. He waited in pointed silence while the young lady turned her phone off, then he icily asked if anyone else had forgotten to turn off his or her phone. The room was pretty quickly cowed. He did not hand out the course outline because “it is online.” I discovered, after a good bit of forensic studenting, that to find this outline, one must use a university lab computer because the external university address has crashed and is not available anywhere else but on a networked computer. Then one must go to the web page for the college of Humanities, go to autumn term offerings, click on “modules”, and then scroll to the bottom of a description to find a link that says “module” (again), then click there to get this outline. The directions the lecturer gave in class were as follows, verbatim: “Just click on the module.” So, I learned from this event that it is very helpful for a person new to any system if one demonstrates a procedure from the splash page (which I do in my own classes).

The history lecture I attended was taught by a real pro. He said he had been teaching for 33 years, and it looks like he has kept up with the times. He had a sense of humor about his discipline, and he communicated that he cared about his students’ success as well as that he planned on challenging his students. He handed out data on how students did in his last class and explained why each who failed did so. He said, "I do this to show you not only how easy it is to fail, but also how easy it is to pass." He discussed his perspective on why he put the syllabus together the way he did, and he reviewed the exam and essay content. Very smooth, highly engaging, and quite informative.

Then I went to try to do a few errands.
I tried to get a student travel card: “No, sorry, we’re not quite up yet. Try later in the week.”
I went to see if used texts were available yet: “Right, well, you know we’ll do that later in the week, but check the web site for availability, but I don’t think it’s updated for this term yet.”
I went to the international education office to see if my immigration appointment was made yet: “We haven’t got those yet. You’ll get an email next week.”
I printed the course outline for the Joyce lit class (which has not met yet). It says, “this class is not appropriate for international students as you will not have the appropriate background assumed for this course. No allowances will be made for unfamiliarity with core texts.”
So I went back to my rooms, made tea, and ate chocolate covered digestive biscuits.

Now, the dorm is not such a bad place. It smells weird most of the time as a result of poor air circulation, but it clears up pretty well once the windows are opened. It is laid out as a short hall with five room off the hall which ends at a door leading to the sitting room and kitchen. The sitting room has two little couches and two chairs facing a TV that gets six channels: RET 1, RET 2, BBC 1, BBC2, EuroSport, and a channel that gets American sitcoms. The kitchen is reasonably equipped for basic cooking, but there are no baking things. In this little suite live Bena dn Dave who are two Irish IT guys. There is one other girl on the hall, Jana, who is a Canadian studying law. Dave has a TV in his room hooked up to the internet, so he and Ben spend most of their time in there emerging only to bake a pizza now and then (there is no microwave). Jana is a merry force of nature. She is out on the town and takes a taxi to the grocery store.

As the village began to fill with students Sunday evening, young boyz carried huge arm-loads of cases of beer into their rooms in the dorm across the street from mine. They were accompanied by girlz who were wearing low-slung jeans such that when they bent to retrieve stray cans that had fallen from the cat-in-the-hat style armloads of beer, they displayed delicate little plumber’s cracks for public view. Last month I actually went to the Gap to try on this style of pants because I wondered how uncomfortable they were. They felt pretty normal while standing, if a bit breezy around the navel. But it felt like the were about to slide right off my butt when I crouched down. Okay, I know my butt is bigger than these aforementioned chickies, but they have to know their asses are hanging out cuz it is very breezy in the aft.