Teaching

Now a brief segway to address a rather overdue subject: my teaching!  Until this week, I was the only one of the three English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) in-country that had a regular teaching schedule.  The upshot to Mediteran University’s extra organization is that I’ve been getting plenty of time in front of a class!  I am teaching first, second, and third year students; fourth year students will be added some time this week.  My job is to teach the English conversation portion of their class – different teachers teach different aspects of English, one teaches grammar, one translation, one conversation, etc.  All together there are three or four teachers working together on each class.  It’s a different system than in the States, and so far it seems rather clunky, but a few more months should give a better feel for how it works.

 

As a whole, my students’ English is already good, and even among the first year students they have no trouble following along with the class – which is good, given my near-total lack of Montenegrin.  Getting class participation has been moderately challenging, but that has been getting better as they get more comfortable with me and the class structure.  I tried to have them get up from their seats and do a large rotating group exercise the first day, and that was probably jumping the gun.  Attendance has been about 60%, which is what I was led to expect.  Given that my enrolled numbers are between 25 and 50, 60% attendance actually makes the classes more manageable.

 

I have noticed a few areas throughout all three classes where there seems to be considerable room for improvement.  Critical thinking skills are not strong, something that was mentioned to me before I arrived.  The local education system focuses on rote memorization, and it shows.  One of my goals is to help these young citizens develop those critical thinking and analytical skills that will serve them far beyond the English classroom.  It’s also pretty clear that sourcing information has not been covered in their education.  They’re picking up the ideas quickly, and I have no doubt that they’ll have moved past reliance on Wikipedia by the end of the semester.  Finally, and particularly noticeable to a historian, their knowledge of history is abysmal.  In one class I asked for students to write me a very short essay in class about any event in Montenegro’s history before 1900.  I had so many blank looks that I had to broaden the available topics repeatedly to eventually include any event in world history before 1940, and still ended up having to specify the Pyramids as a topic of default.  They’re certainly not dumb, far from it, but their educational system has not given them a solid grasp of the basics of history that are so important for forming well-educated voting citizens.  I’ll get off my historian’s soap-box now.

 

I have also learned that my enthusiasm for assigning homework must be matched with an enthusiasm for grading.  Three classes x ~20 students x 500 word essays = a lot of grading!  Herein lies the real work of the job!  Overall, my first couple of weeks as a professor (all caveats for the title applied) have only reinforced that this is something I want to make a career out of.  Hopefully I’ll feel the same way in June.

Packing and Start Dates

Time draws short, and brings stress, excitement, success, and oversights.  Packing the house while trying to keep it presentable for potential renters was challenging, and with great joy we have finally found a very nice couple to rent our home to.  Now the whirlwind can commence in earnest.  Too many projects, boxes and friends wanting to meet one last time for the days left – if you are among those friends, know that it is for want of time and not lack of affection that those visits are pushed off.

A bit of an embarrassing revelation came to light over the last week or so.  One of the peculiarities of the Fulbright process has been the lack of a definite start or end date – no one has given a hard day by which we must arrive in or leave the country; I suspect this is because those dates are largely determined by the schedule of each person’s host institution.  In my case this is the first year that a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant has been posted full-time at Mediteran University, hence the soon-to-be-disclosed issue.  We were encouraged, by the system, to arrange transportation early, as our first payment is not issued until we have bought tickets and said tickets get more expensive the closer to the departure date they are bought.  This being the case, I canvassed opinions for when we should arrive from the Embassy, past ETAs, etc. and was rather uniformly told that an early September arrival in preparation for a mid-September start was the way to go.  None of the information I had received from Mediteran specified differently, and I foolishly (in retrospect) failed to ask them for clarification.  All tickets bought, we will arrive in Montenegro on Friday the 7^th – and I just found out that Mediteran starts classes on the 3^rd.  I contacted them as soon as I suspected the discrepancy (I was digging through their website and came across an academic calendar) and they have assured me that it is no problem, and that I’ll soon be caught up.  Nevertheless, this is not at all how I wanted to start things off!  So my advice to you who follow after me – plan backwards, and try your best to pin down your start date with your institution (especially if it’s new to the program) before buying tickets.