Classes
It turns out that Prof. J- is unusual even by French standards. My class schedule has gotten going a bit more, and I now have three classes a week or so. One of them is a class on the history of diplomacy. Technically, it’s supposed to be a class on the “Law and Practice of Diplomacy,” but it’s taught by an eminent diplomatic historian, so we’re pretty much just doing that. The guy’s a little full of himself – he’s very fond of his extensive studies, and his approach to teaching is somewhat like he’s doing us a favor by bestowing on us his great knowledge. It’s a two hour class, during which he exclusively lectures. I was somewhat surprised by this, as I’m much more used to getting that kind of information from assigned reading, and then discussing it in class. But I guess that’s just another cultural approach: the emphasis here is on learned professors sharing their knowledge, rather than independent research. Even so, I thought the guys was pushing it when he chooses to dictate the section headings of his class outline.
That was before I started the next class, which was about discourse analysis. The professor that teaches that class actually dictates his entire lesson! He reads it at dictation speed from his laptop, and we write down every word he says. Not much thinking involved, no assigned reading. It’s unfortunate, because when someone stops and asks him a question, he’s really good. He could be a great teacher, but he’s probably never experienced anything else, and is just following the methods he’s been taught. Funny story though: during our first class, he went around the room asking each of our names and academic backgrounds. One student, seated several seats in front of me, said that she had just got back from a year in the US. The prof responds with a whole diatribe about “Anglo-Saxon universities.” First of all, they aren’t really universities (at least not how the French think of them), they’re big commercial companies (“grandes entreprises”). Certainly, they have a lot of resources, but it’s a different (read: bad) approach to learning. Secondly, they might be greatly admired, but in his experience, “Anglo-Saxon universities” usually produce students that have only really scratched the surface of what they could learn, they haven’t really internalized what is expected of French students. He goes on like this for several minutes, during which I time I increasingly felt like maybe I should leave the room and never come back. A little while later it’s my turn to introduce myself: “My name is Mark, and I’ve done my studies in the United States, in political science.” Short silence, then a smile: “well, you must have felt a little targeted just now! Well, good, that will motivate you to prove me wrong.” Fortunately, he was nice about it. And I hope that I did prove him wrong – during his introductory class that followed he quizzed the students about various scholars of International Relations, and I was the only student who volunteered any names. He also talked about what was expected in a master’s thesis, all of which I had already studied two years ago in Junior IS (for those from Wooster who know what I’m talking about, things such as the need to be original, to choose a well delimited subject, to make sure you choose and answer a hypothesis, etc).
These individual approaches to teaching have been very different from what I’m used to, but the overall organisation is as well. For one thing, the class schedule still (after a month of school) hasn’t been completely established. Profs have a huge amount of independence – they teach what they want, almost when they want. Furthermore, they aren’t really classes so much as modules. Some of them have a total of 15 class hours – in other words, three weeks of class, then another class with another prof. None of them so far have had any assigned reading, and only one has even talked about a syllabus (but we don’t have it yet because the prof doesn’t have access to the intranet). Much of this is apparently specific to the second year of a master’s degree, where we’re meant to mainly concentrate on our thesis. Which is problematic, because I still have no idea what I’ll be writing about. So I probably should go think about that now…
