(FOR DR. LARSON----#2: Academic Life)
Contrary to what many of you may think, and what most of my pictures might portray, we DO actually have to attend class and learn something while we are here. School over here is pretty similar to school in the states (except for the field trip class!), but our classes here are actually pretty useful and interesting and give us much more perspective to be able to enjoy the place we are living.
We go to class every weekday that we are not traveling, and it generally stars at 15:00 (3:00) every day, and goes until about 19:15 (7:15). The classes are broken up into three different periods, with a different professor for each one and about a 10 minute break between lectures. The first period is usually taught by a guest lecturer who comes in and gives a presentation over a topic we are learning, while focusing heavily on their own specialty. Up to this point, we have had 10 different guest professors, and have learned about topics like: Czech government and politics, Life in medieval cities, Czechs and Germans, Jews in Bohemian lands in the 20th century, Islam in Europe, Gender in Czech society, Key social problems, and Higher education in Europe, just to name a few. This gives us the chance to learn a wide range of topics while also getting to experience many different teaching styles, because almost all of these professors' first language is one other than English. Through these lectures, I feel like I am slowing climbing out of the "ignorant American" stereotype, and can now confidently talk on current topics such as the EU, or the Eurozone, many forms of European government, and how they became that way, why some countries fell under communist regime after WWII, and how many countries gained their independence from it. I fully understand what was happening behind the "Iron curtain", and how many countries are still affected by the events of WWII, and what followed thereafter. I understand the different societies more, and cultural differences are starting to make sense. Walking through a new town, I understand more of what I am seeing, why towns are laid out the way they are, and why some are more grand than others. In America, we have learned some of almost every single one of these topics, but we can actually understand it when we are able to step outside of the classroom and see and experience first hand what we just learned about in class.
The next 45 minutes of class are spent trying to learn the Czech language with our Czech teacher, Kateřina Prokopova. Czech is an especially difficult language, what with 34 letters in the alphabet and 7 tenses for nouns, and so many rules that the teacher can barely keep track of them. What we are learning is cleverly dubbed by the other foreign students as "survival Czech". This mainly consists of the basic "hello, where are you from? My name is... what's yours? How are you? How do say ___ in Czech? What does ___ mean? etc..." We also learn numbers and the weekdays and some basic nouns. One of the most useful things that we have been taught so far though, is how to order correctly at a restaurant, and a lot of useful restaurant vocabulary. I play a game with myself to see how long I can keep the waiter/waitress speaking Czech, before they have to switch over to English for the stupid American girl. We are all really enjoying this class actually, but there really is no way we can learn very much past this in only our short amount of time spent here.
The third lecture is taught by one of our two main Czech professors. Jan Stejskal teaches our more general western civilization class, to give us the background we need to understand most of the other lectures in all of our other classes. His lectures consist of things like: Greek and Roman legacy, Crusades, Women in European history, Europe and the others, Totalitarianism, and Christianity and formation of the European East and West. These lectures are much more history based, which usually I cringe just at the thought, but by living in a place and traveling to places that are so full of history, I have a million questions of how and why and when everything was made and formed and destroyed and rebuilt, so I eat these lectures up, and try to soak up all the answers like a little sponge.
Martin (left) and Jan (right), our amazing professors!
Martin Elbel is our other regular professor, and he teaches a course on the holocaust that is unlike any I have ever had before. We have all learned about the holocaust one time or another in school, but we mainly just learn the timeline, and all the monstrosities that went along with it. Martin delves into more of the psychology of it, and lets us understand how the world and the people in it can let something like the holocaust even happen. He puts forth ideas that there are actually recognizable chains of events that happen before something like the holocaust, and if we see them early enough they can almost act as warning signs. His very first lecture, he talked about the witch hunts in Europe, and all of the events leading up to one of the most gruesome and meaningless massacres in history. Looking back, witch hunts seem so silly, but he explained all of the fear and chaos that led people to believe that they were doing the right thing, and then he showed us the chain of events that led up to holocaust, and they were eerily similar. His lectures are so thought provoking, that every day I am quite literally at the edge of my seat hanging off every word he has to say.
Our last portion of classes (and I loathe to even put this in, because it's not "technically" studying I guess....) is our film, blogging, and field trips! Every week, we get to watch one (relevant!) film about some topic we have learned about recently. Our blogs are pretty self explanatory (because you're reading one..), but I am so glad we are forced to do them, because I know we will all love to look back and read what we wrote while we were over here having the time of our lives! The last part, the field trips, are ACTUALLY EDUCATIONAL, and it is just more of a hands on adventure of everything we have been learning in class. We have traveled to three towns in the Czech Republic, and still have three more, Germany, Austria, Italy, and independently I have also gone to Spain, and we still have yet to go to Poland, where we will visit the much anticipated (and a little bit dreaded) Auschwitz.
These classes are obviously mostly history based, and I usually cringe at even the thought of sitting through a history class, but being here in the heart of some of the most historical and culturally rich places in the entire world has given me a brand new appreciation for all things history. It has opened my eyes to so many things I have been forced to learn for a bubble answer on a test in America for what they really are, and that is something I did not really expect to gain from this little adventure of mine.
