Teaching, Week 1

I have finished lecturing my first week at Daugavpils University, and if feels very good to be doing what, after all, the State Department is underwriting me to do in Latvia. It was a relatively stress-free week, but it was also a bit trial by fire.

The faculty member that I am working most closely with, Irina Presņakova, took ill last week, seriously enough that she needed to be hospitalized. This meant that her first week of classes would 1) be cancelled or 2) be led by me. I don't like to cancel classes, partly because in my home institution classes meet only once a week (for three hours -- this is to accommodate working adults), so that cancelling a class means cancelling a significant amount of the contact hour time. So I told her of course I would teach the classes, not entirely sure what I would be getting into.

In Latvia, the curriculum for courses is far more regimented than it is in the U.S., with set reading lists for students and pretty strict schedules from which one can't deviate greatly. (I suspect that this is because students take state exams, and everybody must generally cover the same material, but I'm not sure if this is so.) One of Irina's courses is the history of the English language, which she is taking over from Sandra Meşkova, who is on sabbatical. I teach this course in my home institution, but from a very different set of premises. Here, all the students are in a philology department, learning languages so that they can translate -- and hence the history course is very much a course in grammar and language structure. Classes meet once a week for 90 minutes, and the history course lasts all year; it is split into two semesters. The entire first semester is devoted to Old English: one or two weeks on the verb forms, one or two weeks on the noun forms, one week on the adjective forms, and so on. Having taken Old English in grad school, where it was commonly known as Old Anguish for good reasons, this approach would be deadly to me; I couldn't talk about Old English noun cases for two hours, much less two weeks, though students here are well prepared for this kind of work. I, on the other hand, teach the course more from a premise of cultural studies: how does Old English lead us into Middle and Modern English, and how does the language reflect the culture that produced it? might be the way to frame where I start. Of course, I talk about grammar and philology -- one can't avoid this -- but primarily to help my students, who are not trained philologists, understand how Old English differs radically from Modern English.

So, anyway, Irina told me basically to go in and do what I do at home, which I did. Mostly it was history: here are the Celts, here come the Angles/Saxons/Jutes, here come the Vikings, and here is what the linguistic map of the British Isles looked like through these centuries, roughly from Roman Brittania to the end of the Viking Age (400 to, say, 900 A.D.).

I was told that Latvian students were shy and did not speak much. I didn't find this to be the case. Not everybody spoke, of course, but that happens at home as well; most, however, were talkative and genuinely tried to engage, though I have the sense that some of them were unused to actually being asked questions like, "What are some of the Celtic languages?" and "What kinds of words do you think Old English borrowed from Latin, and why?" One of the things I repeatedly say in class at home is "Do you have any questions or comments?", and one student told me point blank that Latvian students are never asked this in a class. I am going to take some getting used to.

Generally, my Latvian students were very attentive, and I had that odd experience of having students writing down everything I said. American students just don't do this, for some reason. (A sign of the times, though: one student looked at the blackboard where I had written a lot of material, pulled out his cell phone, and took a snapshot of it.) I hope that Irina will be happy with the content that I covered early in the term. We will talk in the next few days so that I can prepare her for her return.

Her other course is a course in 20th-century American literature, a field that I am not trained in, though I have read widely. For some reason, this class was livelier -- maybe there's something about reading texts and talking about them that loosens students up in a way that discussing noun cases in Old English doesn't. More on that course in the next blog post.