Teaching and Learning

Somehow this week I've had an extraordinary number of pedagogical experiences. Sure, I'm a professor and I teach every week here in Poland (yes, just one day a week -- what a luxury!), and I have learned quite a bit about myself as an instructor, as a lecturer, as a creator and coordinator of instructional materials over the course of the term.

But I am also a student, taking Polish language lessons about once a week with my private teacher, Pani Paulina. And observing some classes and seminars recently has put me in the student seat, which gives one an entirely different perspective.

At the unique Artes Liberales college within the University of Warsaw I've been on both sides of the podium: I guest-lectured last week, and this week I observed "Academic Writing in English," taught by a young Polish PhD, and I attended an international interdisciplinary PhD program seminar.

Finally, on Friday afternoon I sat and listened to my daughter's violin lesson with her Polish music teacher.

At my home institution in the U.S. we had an inane saying for a while, creating by a marketing office or perhaps by a well-meaning instructor: "Teaching -- it's about learning." Since I've been on the podium side of the equation for over twenty years now, I don't always think about the student's point of view.

Let's take the experiences in their chronological order.

The Artes Liberales building at Dobra 72

Last week I was invited to teach a class called "Reading Literary Texts." I think at first my University of Warsaw colleague was disappointed to learn that I couldn't teach it in Polish, but the six or eight students who came are perfectly capable of reading and understanding in English, if several were perhaps too shy to talk much.

[This has been my experience with my undergraduate Gen Ed course at UW as well -- the reading and listening don't seem to be a problem, but sometimes it can be painful to wait for the right words to come in order for some of the students to express their ideas. Sometimes, as happened this week in "Academic Writing," the student will simply finish the sentence -- you can see that he or she had something entirely different and perhaps more sophisticated in mind, but had to give up. A failure of language, a disjuncture in the fabric of the thought process.]

I spoke about Ivan Bunin's story "Cleansing Monday," a story I first taught to undergraduates about three years ago now and that I've been working on since. Teaching this story in Warsaw felt different; suddenly my quotes from Lewis Mumford rang out in a new key.

In his The City in History, Mumford wrote that one of the principle functions of the city is:

to serve as a museum: in its own right, the historic city retains, by reason of its amplitude and its long past, a larger and more various collection of cultural specimens than can be found elsewhere. Every variety of human function, every experiment in human association, every technological process, every mode of architecture and planning, can be found somewhere within its crowded area.

But what about Warsaw? In Bunin's story, I argue, he takes a walking tour of Moscow, lingering on sites during the setting of 1912-1914 that were long gone by 1944 when he was writing -- sites that represented the religious and secular layers of Moscow history, sites he was mourning from his far-away France. This semester in Warsaw, too, I've been walking through history, or the memory of history, though in many cases it is represented by reconstructed building, and in others by graffiti on the walls.


The most vocal student from "Reading Literary Texts," Wojtek, is an articulate and thoughtful young man ready to speak out when his classmates are too shy. He was also in the Academic Writing class, along with three other students who attended on Thursday. As I sat in the back observing and listening to the instructor presenting ideas on how to present one's work orally, I saw his gaze hovering above the students' heads -- he was in his own head and didn't really solicit the students' input. (This was a gaze I recognized -- it happens to me sometimes when I'm lecturing too.)

True, he had a lot of material he wanted to cover, but I personally found my thoughts wandering, and I think the students did too. Interactive teaching takes longer, but in the end the learning is more effective. And in this case the technology -- power point, a podcast -- got in the way of the learning.

The Artes Liberales international interdisciplinary PhD program seminar I attended that afternoon was an utterly different experience. The seminar, called "Dissecting the King's Body" and based on Ernst Kantorowicz's ideas in "The King's Two Bodies," was pulled together by three PhD students in Warsaw and included their ten-minute talks as well as three ten minute talks from a Hungarian professor and two PhD students in England and Spain.

Technology reigned supreme. Even though we were talking primarily about the 16th century, the meeting software allowed participation from all those foreign locations, including another faculty member from Madison, Wisconsin. I was honored to be a part of this immensely complicated and erudite conversation that was made possible by two technicians in the room and dozens of email communications in the weeks leading up to the seminar.

But that was my 3rd pedagogical experience of Thursday. In the morning I had gone to my Polish lesson -- underprepared. My teacher had given me ten days to prepare a debate on any topic I liked, using useful phrases like: In the first place; secondly; on one hand; on the other hand; in addition; as a consequence; to sum up, etc. Very useful vocabulary.

And I love my teacher. We never speak in English, and I have learned so much from her. I have great respect for her and her methods. So when I began to prepare my debate 20 minutes before class in a nearby coffeeshop while drinking my now necessary morning cappuccino, I realized something: just because my students come to class unprepared, it doesn't mean they don't respect me, or like the subject I'm teaching, or are slackers.

Well, maybe it means they are slackers. I certainly thought about that vocabulary list throughout my weekend in Paris and my week of dealing with issues at the university; I simply didn't do anything about it.

My daughter, too, is a slacker.

I sat yesterday listening to her teacher desperately trying to engage her, to solicit her empathy for his forgetting how to say "F flat," "F sharp," and "F natural" in English as he drew bigger sounds out of her and her violin. She has barely practiced at all, but she has definitely learned from Grzegorz.

Maybe being a slacker is not exactly the same as lacking respect for an instructor and love for a subject? The encounters with Grzegorz should be the perfect teaching and learning moment: just two musicians and an instrument for half an hour in a living room on a Friday afternoon. No technology to get in the way of communication.

But maybe, as I often say about my Ohio State students, the real "learning" will come much later, in a year or in 5 years when the teaching encounter has almost been forgotten.

I have more thoughts on the topic, but now I'm off to Polish conversation class.