Roll with the Punches

My second week of teaching at Daugavpils University has been a week of rolling with the punches. When you have a Fulbright, what you think you might be doing in your guest institution and what you really end up doing may not be the same thing.

My colleague Irina, whose courses I would be visiting over the term and guest lecturing, is still ill -- so much so that she has is in Riga, three hours away, for testing. I didn't know what this meant, exactly, and I thought that her condition was serious. The equivalent where I live in the States would be going to Boston, also three hours away, for testing, and that would mean that something is serious. Here, not so much, apparently; going to Riga for treatment seems to be routine. But in any event, Irina is out for the week, and next week -- well, who knows.

So I spent another week substituting in her classes. This doesn't bother me in the least; I am enjoying myself immensely doing what, after all, I came here to do. But I was concerned about what this might mean long term if Irina isn't able to come back to the classroom immediately. When I expressed this concern, my colleagues, through not fault of their own, misinterpreted my feelings and assumed that I was very unhappy about the situation, which is not the case. So I went to my new chair (it was Irina, and now it is Ilze standing in as a substitute) and the Dean of the humanities faculty to assure them that everything is fine. When people get sick, you fill in for them. It's as simple as that.

That said, the substituting is pointing up many of the extreme differences between the American system of higher education and the Latvian system. The history of the English language course here is really a course in the philology of Old English, at least in the first term: a week is devoted to the study of Old English verb forms, a week to noun forms, a week to adjective forms, and so on. My course -- and American courses in general -- is really a course in cultural history, looking at the larger picture of how languages change over time and what that means culturally and historically. Our system is geared to a literature program, and theirs is geared to a linguistics program. So while I am more than happy to discuss Anglo-Saxon culture, language, and literature -- any excuse to show students Anglo-Saxon jewelry from the Staffordshire Hoard and look at manuscripts like the Lindisfarne Gospels is OK in my book -- there will come a point where I won't be equipped to teach this course. I'm not there yet, but I will be. (If you're interested, Google "Staffordshire Hoard" and "Lindisfarne Gospels" and feast your eyes.)

In the meantime, I was told to continue teaching it as I would at home, which is fine. At home, however, I would have a textbook, and students would have it as well. Here, the work of the course is based entirely on my lectures, with some online supplements. Because in the Latvian system students do not buy their own books, I'm at a real disadvantage because I can't assume that we are all on the same page, quite literally. This is especially true in Irina's literature course in 20th-centruy American literature. I lectured on American modernism last week, and this week we looked at some lyric imagist poems of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Carl Sandburg. But I found them online at the excellent website poetryfoundation.org, and we read them in class as a class. This was a new experience for my students. They had simply never read texts together in a class, which is of course one of the basic ways that we teach in the States, everybody with the same book open to the same page. Here, rather, students are given reading lists and expected to read on their own. In class they won't have a text in front of them at all, which makes it hard to do close reading, and impossible to construct meaning as a community of readers. This is especially true of long texts like Pound's Cantos; the only way to teach such a text is to zero in on particulars, and I won't be able to do that. The emphasis here is much more on the teacher as expert, and students are adept at note-taking. I don't say this to criticize the Latvian system, which seems to work; it's just that I can't quite figure out how to make my pedagogy, which is so central to how I teach that it's never occurred to me to question it in any way, work in this very different system.

I will find this harder as I guest lecture in Jeļena's course in early British literature, which was added to the schedule at the last minute, to my surprise, and given that I trained in this stuff, my delight as well. Students here, even though they are reading British and American literature, don't necessarily read it in English. With limited copies of texts, they often read in their native languages of Russian or Latvian. I appreciate this limitation, but it will be hard to teach Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and not talk about his glorious language: Shakespeare is of course all about the language. I can demonstrate some basics about blank verse, of course, but to not be able to really dig into the poetry . . .

Before I left for Latvia, I was advised by my colleague Lisa, who taught in Slovenia on a Fulbright fellowship, to roll with the punches. She was right. I don't mean to present this as whining because, honestly, once I'm in front of a classroom, I take charge and thoroughly enjoy lecturing about material that I find fascinating. But I do feel a bit like a square peg in a round hole, trying to figure out how to fit in.

I will say that once my colleagues were assured that I was more than happy to go into the trenches and teach what was needed where it was needed, they have expressed deep gratitude. "You're always smiling," Ilze noted, which I'm sure is not true. But teaching is in fact a lot of fun, and I really like how my students are responding, speaking up, and getting less shy about not having a full command of English. (I keep telling them that their English skills beat my Russian and Latvian skills by a country mile.) The good thing is that we're all very aware that we're working on melding two very different systems, and this lead to really productive pedagogical conversations down the road. In the meantime, we all continue to roll with the punches.