09.10.09. Attending university.
I read magazines in class now. My school hobby of choice used to be the crossword or Jumble, but vowel-rich Italian is a problematic language for word puzzles (try to unscramble EOULIA). So I peruse the current week’s Espresso, which covers Italian culture and politics and other world news, and read the articles or gaze at the pretty ladies seen recently with Italian president Silvio Berlusconi.
My classes are of course conducted in Italian, which would seem to demand a greater concentration on my part. Certain of my professors do in fact tax me with their high level of discourse or ferocious velocity. My linguistics teacher in particular fires off her material with staggering speed, her tongue a solitary manic hummingbird wing. She keeps her eyes closed and face screwed up all the while, and I have an inkling she is possessed by Noam Chomsky. Despite her pace, I understand ninety-five percent of what she says. As a collegemate who has studied in the U.S. explained, lectures are the easiest thing to follow in a foreign language because of their linearity and linguistic purity. One doesn’t encounter the slang or crowd dynamic that can make the dorms such a confusing and disorienting place.
Often, though, classes here are so easy to understand—and so tempting to sleep through—because the lectures move at a aimless crawl. It’s as if the lot of us have been plucked from our desks and dropped in a jury assembly room. We’re there because someone told us to be there, and we can see someone talking at the front, but why and about what we cannot be sure. After a while—how long we also can’t be sure, because the room has no clock—our body sends protests from the stomach and bladder, and our hands massage our needy areas while the mouth at the front drones. Eventually the mouth stops, and we leave to empty ourselves and then fill ourselves back up.
My French teacher is one such droning mouth. He swishes every syllable around before letting a word dribble from his tongue, and it hangs a moment as literary drool before breaking off and puddling on the floor. In this way he passed the first hour of our first class examining the phrase Je suis japonais.
Important to note is that while I have inherited the bubbly good nature of my father, I have the endless patience of my mother. She taps this well on a daily basis with her two hundred and fifty middle school students, and I have made extensive use of mine as a camp counselor for a similar age group. Ten-year-olds are into things like Yu-Gi-Oh! and want nothing more than to tell a stream of anecdotes about three-thousand-year-old pharaohs. An impatient counselor will soon find his thoughts wandering or his fist striking out; I have always managed to keep my hands to myself. But after an hour of French grammar and having written in my notebook only “schwa,” I eyed the professor and wondered how tightly I would have to roll my conjugation handout to make an air-worthy javelin. I tried to content myself by jotting down ideas for stories or fake news articles (“Levi’s Manager Fired Over Formal Fridays”), but my having sat in the front row made it difficult to check out entirely. In a final effort to salvage the class I glanced about looking for sympathetic eye contact, but every other student was paying rapt attention and taking notes. Perhaps they were filling their notebooks with great lists of Je suis japonais Je suis japonais Je suis japonais à la Bart Simpson. I was suffering deeply and alone, and I knew remaining for the second hour of class meant descending a steep path of mental retardation. I gathered my things and left.
Down the street I reflected on my experience over a cup of hazelnut and dark chocolate gelato. That one inept man could ruin my whole study abroad experience surprised me, but what struck me most was that the professor was not oblivious to his tedium. He had in fact stopped himself partway through Je suis japonais to apologize for being so dull. “I’ve been teaching French grammar for twenty-five years,” he had said, “and you would think over that time I would have found a more clever way to teach the subject. But I haven’t.” He had admitted, in effect, that he is a bad teacher, he knows he is a bad teacher, and he has spent the last twenty-five years doing nothing about it.
How can an education system allow such open ineptitude? The United States are certainly home to numerous incompetent teachers, and they usually retain their jobs (please see “The Rubber Room,” The New Yorker, Aug. 31, 2009). But our colleges, especially those of great repute, tend to hold themselves to a higher standard of teaching.
Not necessarily so at the University of Pavia, even though it would seem one of the likeliest places to find quality professors. The UP is one of the oldest universities in Europe, dating to Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV’s founding decree in 1361, and it boasts such achievements as being the first in Europe to use cadavers instead of wax corpses in anatomy lessons. Yet the school’s poor teaching is widespread enough that students have begun to expect it. When people ask how my lessons are going, they expect me to say they’re awful and I can’t wait to return to the University of Oregon. If instead I praise a course—three of my classes are actually quite interesting—they seem surprised and sometimes dubious.
Somehow, though, this common distaste for and occasional antipathy toward the university system does not spur Italian students into action. Far from rebelling, the students I know make up a quite cooperative cog of the machine. They sit quietly in class taking diligent notes, and they do a relatively small amount of text messaging. The plodding professors forge their didactic course through the student body like a river carves through a canyon, with low levels of obstinate force, and students by and large accept this geological time frame. It seems that some permutation of omertà, the simultaneously respectful and fearful silence usually discussed in the context of the mafia, has infiltrated the education system.
Aggrieved Italian students do at least have recourse to the education resistance tool of skipping. College students in the U.S. skip classes all the time (myself excluded, until I began taking French here), but this has less to do with poor instruction than nursing hangovers or enjoying a splendid day of sunshine. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off offers an example of the nature of the American truant. In Italy, skipping is akin to a sit-out. Students sit at the university cafe and sip cappuccinos or beer while their lessons creep on without them. This pleasant leisure is part of the reason for their skipping, but they skip with greater willingness because they know they’re not missing anything.
University professors, in their astuteness, recognize that their students will often be gone and address their eventual absence on the first day of class. Many teachers are open about the fact that attendance isn’t required, and there is often a separate final exam for non-attendees. In this way the teachers continue as they always have and students take part at the level they desire. The university is an old Fiat 500 that nobody wants to scrap, so it instead gets its oil changed every three months or 4,828 kilometers and chugs on.
I observe and judge this system from the outside, but it is not my place as a backseat driver to try to fix things. My job is to adapt and thrive within the established learning environment.
What can I take away from my first few weeks of classes? If the professor can accept his tedium, so can I. During my last art history class I spread my magazine before me and perused the articles while the professor lectured. I was sitting halfway up the classroom of stadium seating, but had made the tactical error of choosing the row next to the slide projector. After the professor made a few brief remarks at the front of the classroom, she climbed the stairs and lectured right beside me. It is possible that once or twice her gluteal crease touched my left shoulder. Usually she had her back turned to me, but at one point she revolved to include my side of the class and found me reading an article about the rise of scientology in Italy (a topic for another essay—it is enough to say that the foot soldiers of Prophet L. Ron Hubbard have infiltrated Italian society and politics, with the epicenter thirty minutes away in Milan). Closing my magazine would have meant not only an admission of guilt but contrition, and my French professor had taught me how to accept my failings yet stay the course. I raised my eyes to meet my professor’s and she offered a ponderous smile, like a duchess whose servant has just picked up her braised rabbit, licked off the seasoning and replaced it serenely. Then she continued her lecture. She turned my way more often after that, and because I didn’t wish to offend I made the small concession of picking up my pen. But she didn’t say anything during or after the lesson. I was just a student who had figured out a way to be truant in class.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I am not officially enrolled in art history. I am not risking a failing grade by making my Buellerian point. I am coming to understand how the process works here and why the system has the quirks that it does. For instance, sovrapposizione—the overlapping of classes—is a matter of course here. Tuesdays from eleven to one I have three courses and must simply choose one to attend. On other days these courses do not overlap; their hours seem to have been changed on Tuesdays specifically to create sovrapposizione. I am sorry to have to choose from among modern literature, linguistics, and history of theater, but I have realized that my desire to attend every lesson of every class is something alien. Such extreme overlapping persists because people at all levels—administrators down to students—assume a certain level of truancy.
This attitude does not inspire great confidence in the Italian university system, but it does bode well for the foreign exchange student. If one or two classes are so bad I refuse to attend and others I must miss because of scheduling, my days become longer. And when there are so many churches to see and flavors of gelato to try and pictures of presidential escorts to admire, well, as the Italians say, meno male. Thank goodness.◊