Back-to-school meeting

Friday, October 2, was the first official meeting of the school year, and it proved to be a foretaste of what I should expect. Around sixty students filed into a small classroom that obviously hasn’t been renovated since the 1980s. The meeting is informational, intended to explain what the specificities of the degree we’ve signed up to do. First oddity – hardly anybody stops talking when the professor starts. This continues during the entire two-hour meeting: students talked to each other all the time, making no effort to keep their voices down. Second oddity: the professor begins by essentially yelling at everybody.

“My name is the professor J.-P. J-. My phone number i x and my email address is y. And let’s immediately make one thing clear: I am in charge of this master’s program, and no one else! It is my signature on the diploma, and legally, I am the only decision-maker! “

I’m somewhat shocked at this introduction, but apparently no one else is, apparently only about half of the students are even paying attention. After this outburst the prof continues in a completely normal tone of voice, talking mostly about mundane things such as deadlines. One female students asks (or rather shouts above the din) a question, apparently about deadlines. The prof obviously didn’t like something about the question, because suddenly, out of nowhere, he starts yelling at her. But this time he’s really yelling, absolutely furious. There was no forewarning in his tone of voice, and I didn’t even understand what he was talking about or why the student’s question was so offensive. Fortunately, she’s completely undisturbed, and yells right back at him!

The meeting lasts for a couple of hours before we’re all dismissed. Because the system is so different, I’m utterly at a loss to understand about a third of it, but the experience what enlightening enough.

One other thing though: something that struck me then and has continued to strike me since, is how few resources seem to be available to keep up the buildings. Most places seem to be left over from the ’80s or early ’90s, somewhat similar to what old Kauke used to be like for those who’ve experienced that. For example, in class today the prof wanted to use an overhead projector (something that in itself is becoming pretty rare in the US), but he had to give up because the fan was so loud we couldn’t here him speak. And in one classroom I was in last week, a window pane was broken, and was simply covered up with cardboard and duct-tape. Furthermore the main building is really intriguing, I wish I knew more of its history. It’s one of those old -shaped official residence-type structure, if you’re at all familiar with what I’m guessing is 19th century European architecture. There are (I think) three main staircases, and three or four floors. But on the landing between each floor are doorways and hallways leading to seemingly architecturally impossible locations – these are called ‘between-floors’ (“entresol”). So the floor numbering goes: ground floor, ‘between floor’ leading to the first floor, first floor, ‘between floor’, second floor, second floor ‘between floor,’ third floor. Or something like that. Quite often you have to go down half a floor and come back up on another staircase to get to another room on the same floor where you started! Last week, I had class in a room whose door was on the ground floor, but the room was actually on the first ‘between-floor,’ so it has its own private staircase leading up to it. Weird!

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~ by Carnildo on October 15, 2009.