Three more days...

... and I will be on my way to Green Country with my colleague from the history department, her family, and 16(!) students from the Honors program. This is more than double the number we had last time, and even though a couple of the students are technically peer mentors (i.e., juniors / seniors with prior study abroad experience, who aren't taking the classes but are instead along to help with interpersonal stuff, RA-style), it's starting to feel a little overwhelming.

I hadn't even really thought about the logistics of getting twenty people with all associated luggage onto buses / to our lodgings / to the right meeting points for our various excursions until yesterday, and now I am thinking about it, and ... OMG. Also, in just over a week I will be teaching a whole class that I also haven't thought very hard about since the last time I taught it.

There seems to be more parental involvement, and more anxiety, with the Honors students. I taught Honors comp for the first time this spring, and I noticed the anxiety thing there as well. I mean, I sometimes wish our non-Honors students were MORE inclined to stress out about their grades, but ... there has to be a happy medium somewhere, surely? (I don't remember my parents getting this involved when I went to Spain for a semester in college, although my mother definitely has the right temperament for it -- but maybe I've blotted it out? I think it also helped that my parents had both lived in Europe, and were very comfortable with travel as a concept, whereas for many of our students / parents / SOs, this is all New and Strange territory. It's cool in many ways -- you can see the horizons getting wider -- but it also means they think everything is much scarier than it is.)

One of our students was apparently cautioned by her family not to drink any alcohol on the trip, because it is VERY DANGEROUS. (Whether drinking alcohol in general is dangerous, or just drinking it in Green Country, was unclear.) As these are all nineteen- and twenty-year-old students, going to a country where they will be able to drink legally for the first time ... good luck with that.

I hope they are less-stupid about drinking, and about walking home alone at three or four or five in the morning, than I was when I was their age. But I also hope they learn to explore, and to be fearless.

Photos, belatedly

I was going to write a proper back-from-Green-Country post a couple of weeks back, but I was about to leave for some islands (blessedly alone) to celebrate getting tenure and surviving my first travel-with-students experience, so I'll just post a few photos in which you can see the many fine shades of greenness that Green Country has to offer.

Yup, that's one of our students up on the wall. Nope, nobody fell off. There were times I felt like it wasn't for want of trying.

And nobody fell off the cliff either, so it was all good.

The sculpture had particular relevance to my class, so I showed an image one day, only to find that the students had already stumbled across it and wondered what it was. I like it when that sort of thing happens.

Texts and contexts

This is our classroom, at least most of the time; it came with enough furniture to seat eight, which was exactly the number we needed. Sometimes we go outdoors, or into the games room at the student apartment complex if we need to use the TV, and my colleague will be holding her class in the pub on Monday. (I plan to do the same for our very last session, once we are back in the capital. I figure the writer we'll be reading that day would have approved.) But most of the time, here we are hanging out in the living room / kitchenette.

And students talk. My God, do they talk. They argue about whether the Revolutionary Poet was a hero or an idiot, and whether the Playwright-and-Memoirist views the rural villagers he writes about as a separate, lesser order of people or whether he really gets them and their culture. They say smart and insightful things about the gender politics of personifying the nation as a woman. They make awesome connections to things they're learning in my colleague's class, despite the fact that her material ends about 700 years before mine begins. Some of this, no doubt, is due to the fact that they are an exceptionally self-disciplined and committed group, as evinced by the fact that they managed to scrape together $5,000 for this trip in the first place. But I also think that we have, quite accidentally, stumbled upon the ideal setting and context for a college class, and achieved something that is supposed to happen but very rarely does: students are talking to each other as much as to me, and they feel comfortable enough around each other to take up opposing positions. And there are too few of them to hide behind each other and let a tiny minority do most of the talking. It probably also helps that we have drunk beer, scrambled over rocks, and wandered through cow pastures together, all of which tend to dispel any notions that professors are a separate species.

I wish there were some way to bottle this atmosphere and bring it back with us. Maybe if we capped all of the courses at ten and installed comfy couches in every classroom, that would be a start; but I think you also need the sort of group bonding that comes through shared experience, and I don't think there is any way to make that happen artificially. (I realize that the "learning communities" trend is supposed to achieve this, but I'm skeptical about whether it actually works.)

Four days 'til Green Country ...

Well, more like three and a half, I guess. This time four days from now we will be jammed into our airline seats for a long overnight flight, and this so does not feel real yet. In a week's time, I will be getting ready to teach a class that is totally new to me and SO far outside of my area of expertise. That part doesn't feel real either. I don't have much of a plan other than "we will read a bunch of books and poems that I think are interesting, and talk about them." (Which is, admittedly, about as much of a plan as I ever have for class, but most of the time I'm teaching material I've taught before, and also most of the time I have access to a whiteboard and a projector, which I won't on this trip.)

Also, sometime in between now and then, I really need to organize masses of paperwork, and also print off all of the online readings for my class for our 78-year-old auditor who doesn't do computers. (Who is going to be a pain in the ass, by the way. I was afraid of this from the beginning, but I was trying to keep an open mind because we really needed more warm bodies on this trip, but honest to God, this woman has basically stepped out of a Tennessee Williams play, and I don't even like Tennessee Williams characters when they are on the stage. By intermission I am always wishing that everyone in the play would Just. Shut. Up. Already.)

So I am worried about being in for a month of Just. Shut. Up. Already, and also worried about all the other interpersonal drama that goes along with ten people spending a month in close quarters. Travel with other people is always so stressful, and part of me really just wants to grab the backpack and run of to Bucharest or something, alone. And I really want the students to have a good time, and will feel guilty if they don't.

(This is making it sound like I regret having decided to do the trip. I don't -- or at any rate, I don't think I will. There will assuredly be good theater and good seafood involved, so there is no way this can be a total loss, and I think it will be cool seeing Green Country with students, for whom it will all be new.)

And hey, even if it is an absolute disaster, at least there is no chance I will lose my job over it. 'Cos you know what? As of this week, I have tenure.

Bianca and Kate: a Misnomer U story

I've been in two minds about whether to post about this, but about a month and a half ago, one of our study abroad students -- I'll call her Bianca -- started making noises about possibly having to withdraw from the trip. This alarmed us considerably, since we were already at minimum numbers. Bianca offered no further explanation, but her friend, Kate, eventually turned up in my co-leader's office to explain that Bianca's family was in grave financial difficulty, and that while she had been able to scrape together (just) enough to make the payments, she wasn't sure she'd be able to buy textbooks, food, or anything else while we were away. To compound matters, some of her family were opposed to her spending money on what they saw as a luxury.

Bianca is a good student, but very quiet. Kate is the opposite, loud and brash and confident. It appeared that Kate had actually lent Bianca some of the money that she had been using to make the payments. Bianca, she explained, never got to do fun things like this, and Kate didn't really need the money right now. I don't know Kate's exact background, but I went out for tapas with her and her uncle once (because that is the sort of thing that happens sometimes at small colleges), and they struck me as probably very comfortably upper-middle-class. Kate, I think, had an upbringing that lent her a much more expansive sense of what is possible, and surmised that the faculty might be able to do something about Bianca's situation if they knew about it. And -- again because this is the sort of thing that happens at small colleges -- she was absolutely correct. We went to the Dean, who is AWESOME and immediately offered to buy the books himself, and to the chair of my department (because Bianca is one of our majors, but also because my chair knows everybody and can pull a lot of strings). They swung into action, and the upshot is that Bianca should have a fair chunk of emergency-scholarship money coming to cover her living expenses. Happy ending. (The sum of money, I should note, is in the three-digit range -- the sort of amount that seems big when you're a college student but laughably small later in life.)

So, a couple of things about this story: First, of course, it wouldn't happen at a state flagship university. You need to be at a place with a short enough chain of command, and a dean who knows individual students, and is willing to go to bat for them. You also need a few people who see travel, and all those other little enriching experiences, as an integral part of educating students. So, not the kind of thing that happens at a totally no-frills institution either, although I think no-frills colleges serve a useful purpose.

But more than all that, this story doesn't have a happy ending without Kate. And that, I think, is the real virtue of an institution like ours -- a public liberal arts college, not super-exclusive but academically solid. We're accessible to the Biancas, but we're also attractive to the Kates, and we're small enough that they'll meet up and befriend each other instead of stratifying into their own little cliques by the end of freshman orientation. And when students from different backgrounds come together, some pretty awesome things can happen. But it seems to me that they happened more often a generation ago, and are likely to happen less in the future -- because there are such big, class-based differences in colleges people aspire to attend in the first place, and as tuition goes up and up, the message from the media is increasingly becoming elites to the fancy R1s, plebes to the community colleges and for-profits, nothing in the middle.

But for now? We have a little space where the Biancas and Kates can and do meet, and where there are several people committed to making sure Bianca gets the chance to travel outside of the country for the first time in her life. And I'm proud to work in that little space. That is something.

Fleeing the country (with students)

So, I have not been blogging about this because I didn't want to jinx it, and it has been touch and go whether we could get and keep enough students for the trip to make, but I think it is time to make it official: In less than two months, a colleague and I will be leading our first study abroad trip. We'll be flying out of Nearest Large City to our destination -- let's call it Green Country* -- spending a few days in the capital city hitting the tourist sites pretty heavily, going to Quieter City and staying there for three weeks, and then heading back to the capital for another week before going home. Somewhere in there, we both teach accelerated summer-term classes. Mine, I must confess, is cobbled together from a single graduate course on Greenish literature that I took fifteen years ago and a few texts that I've taught in survey classes, and I am feeling massively underqualified to teach it -- but there has to be a first time for everything, and at least I do know a lot about figuring out the logistics of travel-on-the-cheap, which is certainly a relevant skill if not an academic one. Somehow I ended up in charge of all the budgeting and finances. (Yes, that is the sort of thing one might normally expect the study abroad office to handle. No, they don't. Long story.)

We originally planned this as an Honors trip, which would have come with a built-in audience with travel scholarships, but for various reasons that ended up not happening. So after recruiting like crazy, we're taking five non-Honors students from Misnomer U., and one retiree from the community who's coming along as an auditor, and one student from a neighboring university. That was exactly the number we needed for the trip to make, so we've been keeping our fingers crossed nobody would drop out. There isn't much of a culture of study abroad here outside of the Honors program, and most of the students don't have the money (nor are there scholarships available for non-Honors folk). But we made it. That feels like a triumph. And in the end, I'm glad that we're doing this outside of Honors. Because I love the Honors students, but they have so many opportunities handed to them that really should be available to all of our students, and this group has worked so hard to come up with the money themselves and find ways to make it all happen.

We just held an orientation session, in which we threw way too much information at our students and fielded questions ranging from the predictable ("Will I be old enough to drink in Green Country?"**) to the moderately wacky ("Can I bring an acoustic guitar in a gig bag?"***), and it's finally starting to feel real.

It's going to be interesting. Ever since grad school, I have been used to using travel as a way to get away from my everyday academic life, or even, secretly in my heart of hearts, regarding my academic life as a way to finance travel. And it has become a way to turn into a different person for a while, one who doesn't give a damn about student evaluations or readers reports, one who feels younger and less tied-down, takes bigger risks, strikes up quick friendships with strangers and then says goodbye as quickly. One thing I haven't ever tried to do is combine these two lives. (I'm wondering, now, what sort of teacher I will become in Green Country, where our classes will be taught here-there-and-everywhere -- in our lodgings, maybe outdoors sometimes, maybe in the pub -- and whether I will bring that teaching persona back with me.)

* No, not Greenland. We're nowhere near that exotic.
** Yes, you will. Hopefully you won't do anything stupid.
*** Well, you COULD, but we really aren't sure you want to.