The Good, the Bad, and the Need for "Boh"

Classes have finally started, and I definitely have some mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I’m very eager to be learning, you know, non-language-y material again; however much I love languages, I like to think about real world stuff beyond just basic grammar, and am looking forward to doing so again - while learning Italian simultaneously! On the other hand, I’m intimidated. No qualifiers necessary. I’m just plain intimidated. Mostly of my art history of Emilia Romagna (this provence) class, although I haven’t had 3 of the 6 yet, so we’ll have to see what happens with those later on.

Ok, I should probably actually tell you what classes I intend to take while here. (First, a point about the structure of the semester here: some courses continue for the whole term, some for only half and start either around now or around the beginning of November. I say “around” because while most first-half courses start this week, one of mine won’t start until next, as the group of us found out today by waiting for the prof for 20 minutes before someone came and told us the real starting date…) I will be continuing the Middlebury Literatura Ferrarese e Scrittura class that we’ve had for the last two weeks, and which will end at the beginning of November, although Middlebury will for some reason be counting it as a full course credit unlike the other half-term courses. I decided to not take a literature course at the university, unlike like what I am previously thought, and am instead thinking of taking the equivalent (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, etc!) back at Middlebury at some point. I AM however probably going to do Human Geography (first half), Italian Linguistics and Dialects (first half), Medieval Art History (focus on Italy) (second half), Iconography and Iconology (second half), and Art History of Emilia Romagna (full term).

I’ve had the Ferrara literature course for the last two weeks, and have my midterm in it this Friday; it’s not a very challenging course so far, and although it’s sometimes boring I’ve generally been enjoying it. The professor is very friendly, and I’m glad to finally be reading real material in Italian, as well as grateful for how it gave me a way to get back into the language after Arabic school. The stories and poems, all about the character and history of this city, are rather depressing in and of themselves though. I already explained some of this, with how the city is characterized as being dead. Although I still stand by my earlier argument against that, the more I learn about specific events in the city’s history and think about the way people treat them in modern day, or as I see more about how people interact on a daily basis, I’m starting to understand the “apathetic and distant” characterization of Ferrara. But more on that at a later date.

I’ve had my Geography course twice now, and think I’ll stick with it. I introduced myself to the professor as an international student, like they recommended to us, and had the sometimes amusing result that today in class the professor repeatedly made comments and jokes about the US, or drew comparative examples between Europe and the US, and had a tangent about how he didn’t believe me that spoke English because “it is predicted” that American English will be destroyed in 20 years by online-chat spelling and Americans being lazy and speaking too quickly and not caring about saying things properly. A few of his comments made me want to protest, and a few were, as far as I knew, actually wrong. Despite the fact that he seemed to interact much more with the students than they say is normal for Italian professors to do, I still didn’t think it would be appropriate to outright contradict the professor in front of the whole class. And so just chuckled and listened.

His teaching style is radically different from that of Pete Nelson, the fantastic geography professor I had at Middlebury last spring. Pete’s course last spring was extremely well organized, logically layed out, a mix between lecture and discussion, had clearly relevant examples, and moved from the theoretical to the applied, which was in turn organized in terms of an increasing spatial/network-size scale. Makes sense for a course on Economic Geography, right? Things that have struck me about how this professor here teaches: how he introduces topics (or doesn’t), how he didn’t give much of a theoretical basis at the beginning and just jumped in pretty quickly, gave a pretty generalized overview of the course (I really have no idea what the layout, structure, or topics are actually going to be – except that they won’t include physical geography, which made me think “well, duh”), and the storytelling, tangential feeling of all the examples. He pretty quickly got into talking about demographics and population issues, so I guess that’s the first subject of the course.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the classroom etiquette and structure in Italy (and much of Europe) is very different from in the US: teacher stands up at the front, doesn’t even introduce themselves, doesn’t ask for students’ names, anything. And lectures. For two hours. There is no syllabus. There are no daily handouts. There is no daily homework. In fact, you don’t even sign up for the class – you sign up for the exam, at the end of the term, and then maybe show up for the ORAL exam in exam month (for me, January). I say maybe because some Italians will take a class one year and if they don’t feel prepared or can’t attend the exam period, they just do the exam the following year. I have no clue how they remember everything, but hey! That’s what they do. You’re expected to have read all the recommended books, and attended the lectures, and if you didn’t, then sucks for you, you get one shot at a grade. Oral comprehension and examination is VERY BIG here, meaning I had better learn to speak/understand Italian better, and quickly.

With this course, thankfully, I felt pretty comfortable understanding the majority of what he was saying, which was a great feeling. I couldn’t catch enough of the vocabulary to write all my notes actually in Italian, but could somehow understand them well enough to get the concepts and write them out in English. With a few random words in Arabic, Japanese, and French, as is the nature of my strangely mixed note-taking shorthand. I couldn’t understand everything, but it was easy enough to follow, the professor seems really friendly, and it will intriguing to see what “human geography” means from the Italian perspective. Already I could tell some differences in material, by the examples the prof gave (ie: afghani immigrants, not hispanics).

In general since my last post, I have been feeling increasingly comfortable in the language every day, which is nice. I’ve just accepted the fact that I’m not quite as good at speaking as are the others in the program, and the fact that occasionally I get some interference from my other languages. If that’s the consequence of me doing several at a time, then that’s what I have to deal with. For the most part, it hasn’t been that big of a problem recently. I’ve gotten used to the expectation that I won’t understand anywhere close to everything I encounter in Italian, but unlike in Arabic school, I do expect of myself that I can understand a lot. (I was in first year Arabic, and although we could comprehend and say quite a lot by the end of the program, I was never taken aback when I couldn’t get something – that was just the environment, a fun but constant challenge, designed to expose you to higher levels of language than your own.) My expectations perhaps set me up for a bit of a shock last night, though.

I don’t like to complain, but I think this next bit I just have to get out, so please forgive me for the grumpiness:

The other class I’ve attended so far kind of scared the hell out of me, I have to admit. It was the course on Art History of Emilia Romagna, and although I am used to having to put a lot of time and work in to the Middlebury HARC (history of art and architecture, in case I refer to that again) courses, I am also accustomed to being able to notice visual details and patterns, and to understand concepts easily and to having a strong foundation both for methodological theory and the vocabulary of a wide aray of art/architectural forms. That being said, I know the specialized vocabularly for 1) concepts, 2) theories, 3) artistic forms in ENGLISH. NOT ITALIAN. I kind of got wacked with this fact in class yesterday, after being so strongly encouraged by the geography class and by the various books I’m reading in Italian right now. And wacked hard.

In the two hours of lecture, I maybe (with some serious wishful thinking) got half-2/3 of the general concepts. And by that I mean general concepts that were mentioned over the first half-2/3 of the class period. Hence the probably wishful thinking about the first comment. I understood much of what he said for the first ten minutes, which was good, and it got progressively harder. The last major chunk of class I could catch individual phrases but had no real clue at all what he was talking about. I don’t remember anything from that part of the class, except for the fact that we’re going to have unofficial mini oral exams at the beginning of each month (good thing to have caught, eh?) The professor kept looking at me for the first big part of the class, and kept asking everyone (but often while looking at me) if we understood, and telling us to ask questions if we didn’t. The problem was that I had no idea what to even start with in order to ask about. I’m sure the concepts wouldn’t have been difficult – if I had a clue what they were. At one point, he was talking about woodcutting and a process like lithography as a method for distributing copies of famous images for educational purposes. 1) I missed why this was an important point, and 2) he had to explain for 10 minutes what “incisione” was, as I think I wasn’t the only one with an unknowing facial expression when he asked “so, you know what this is, right?” I felt silly once I figured it out. This is going to be an interesting way to learn vocabulary, I have to say. If I can understand anything that’s going on, that is.

Beyond the vocabulary, I think part of the problem was his accent – very unclear, with “r”s that sounded almost like the consonant version of a “y”, and generally very mumbly, made worse by the fact that the nearly empty room reverberated with his voice. Me being hungry, exhausted from the day, unprepared for my inability to comprehend anything, the way he asked me a few direct questions (which I couldn’t understand and had missed the context of), etc. just really made this a stressful experience. I also started getting really homesick in the middle of it and just wanted to leave, and almost burst out crying when Leah asked me afterwards if I were ok, on our way to yet another class, and actually did burst out crying when I got home later.

Not so happy Emmons. Being exhausted, homesick, lonely, and very intimidated does not make a good combination, even when low blood sugar is taken out of the equation. Luckily, Mary Katherine (a friend from Middlebury, from those of you who don’t know) messaged and then webcam-called me when I got home, and talking with her for a while made me feel a lot better, as did getting to talk with my brother Alex for a while after that. However, I did have to go to sleep with the quilted valentine from my mom and one of my shawls as a substitute for my comfort-blanket, which is of course at home for its protection...

So yeah, that wasn’t such a good ending to my first real day in a foreign university. I know it will get much easier, and that this will greatly improve my Italian, that everything will be ok and being here will be worth it in the end. But let’s just say that in the last few days I have gotten a huge new appreciation for Middlebury (English language, the campus, the clothes washers and dryers (so important!), familiar environment, friends there and family not terribly far away (so important!!!), well organized website and course information, an actual bookstore that has the books you need for class, not in a city, people to come home to at night, people to hug and hang out with more easily, a community, Xenia, only having to cook when I want to instead of all the time, oh so many resources and nice facilities, etc. etc. etc.) And that’s not to even mention the comforts of being at home-home with my family. Can you tell I got homesick/Midd-sick for the first real time here yesterday? I’m trying in general to be optimistic, because if I get too upset about the difficulties here, I expect it might be hard to pick myself up and enjoy being here after that, especially given what others have told me about troubles being lonely while abroad. Usually my attitude here has worked. Yesterday just rather made me crash, though. At least today’s class (geography) went well again. That’s positive… Let's see how this art history class goes again tomorrow (please be less stressful!)

If I ever am overly stressed out by Middlebury again, someone please just remind me that I could actually go full time to an Italian university, and that I should just stop and think about what I do have that’s good in my life (quite quite a lot). Here’s to being optimistic and perservering.

I don’t think I have mastered the philosophy of “boh!” yet. Need to work on that.

Next up: traveling adventures, including Venice! But first, to dinner…