Week one: orientation to Canlit

As promised, some blather about what teaching at the University of Zagreb is like so far.

This is the building, the Fakultet, as they call it, in which the departments of English, Archeology, History, and other Arts/Social Sciences are housed. The architecture is brutal, but out of an adjacent building I hear the sounds of musicians practicing. Hey, there's a faculty of shipbuilding here. Cool!

This sculpture is in front of it—it’s supposed to represent some kind of workers’ struggle, but as one of my Croatian colleagues said today, it reminds her more of having cramps.

This is my office, which I share with two others (last week it was three others). Professors have their own washroom, for which you need a key. But there's wifi. Yay! Can you see my gorgeous new MacBook Air?

I have met my students; I have taught for six hours. I do not really know how it is going. One thing I know for sure is that six hours of introduction to Canadian history, geography, literary history, and so on, is too much. Ramble, ramble. I bored myself. On day one I gave them a “fun quiz” to see what they know about Canada. Questions were both serious and silly. I modeled the quiz, partly, on Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans,” but I assured these Croatian students that there was nothing at stake if they did not know the answers and that I did not really expect them to know much about Canada. Indeed, I assured them that not all Canadian students could answer some of those questions. Certainly, I was not (like Mercer) trying to embarrass them. Some of the students have relatives or friends who have immigrated to Canada, so obviously they got most of the answers right. Even those who did not have much background knew that, for instance, the official languages are French and English, who the Metis are, and that Justin Bieber, Nelly Furtado, and K’naan are Canadian musicians. Wow! They were less clear about which actors I mentioned were Canadian, but that’s probably true of our own students because the actors I named are all in the Hollywood system. And truly, when it came to identify Canadian authors, they were stumped. Enter visiting lady professor of Canadian literature. Pleased to help you with that!

So, the intro was too long, but this is their first week, and I could not expect them to have read any literary texts. I began with basic context. Only today did we do some analysis of a text—and it was the Multiculturalism Act. The rhetorical analysis we undertook was fascinating. I asked them to identify key words: they identified these: equity, community, diversity, rights, heritage (and more, but I forget what I wrote on the board). What I would have identified are the verbs in the document: preserve, recognize, enhance, foster, promote (actually one student did offer that), share, participate. So we already had a place from which to speak. Why did I focus on the verbs and they on the nouns?

These are my students (minus who has what we call scheduling conflicts and what they call ‘collisions’—I like collisions better). 

Helena, Vedran, Pavle, Andrea, David, Katarina, Natasha, Adriana, Ana. Igor is missing. They are all smart.

And we are in one of the three classrooms in which I teach. We move around a lot and breaks are longer than ours. In a three-hour class a break could be anywhere from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours. All of the classrooms are nicer than those I teach in at UW. And the classrooms are in the same building as my office (the library is in the same building as well); the classrooms have new, wood furniture; they have windows; they have state-of-the-art computers and data projectors that are not locked away and that always work. They have room to move and air to breathe.

This is a photo of a pile of outdated computers that are just dumped in a stairwell. I don’t know why they are still there.

Today I told my students that I was writing a blog and I told them what it was called. They immediately responded to the phrase “in the Balkans.” They do not think of themselves as living in the Balkans. Should I change the name of the blog? What do you think?