If I could turn back time...

I had a long and productive day today which was a strange mirror image of a past life.

I woke up fairly early this morning (for me) and headed merrily off on a Monday to an informational session at the Complutense for students in the "estudios ingleses" program about their study abroad options.  I had been invited by my Complutense mentor to speak about opportunities to study in the US in general, and the Fulbright program in particular, because the students who study English mostly focus on the UK and "no se dan cuenta de que el Brexit va en serio."  The beginning of the session was marked by the sad uncertainty that has hung over many things swamped by the politics of stupidity lately, as the professors urged the students to apply now for an Erasmus year in the UK, and if doing less than a full academic year to do the first semester or trimester abroad next year, before March 29, 2019 at 11:00 PM ("hora de Londres, naturalmente" as my mentor put it) when in the words of Yes, Minister "the curtains come down, the lights go out, and the balloon goes up."



There were also nice presentations about places where students have gone abroad to study English before, from current Erasmus students doing their exchange year from those locations.  The presentation about the university of Budapest was heavy on the beauties of Hungary and the fun activities organized for Erasmus students (though it was given in impressively good English by a young woman whose slightly repetitive use of the adjective "cool" was the only clue she was not completely comfortable in the language).  The presentation on the University of Southampton by two young women, one with as close to a classic London cockney accent as I have ever heard outside of TV, and one with a slightly different accent that I was too stupid to identify actually gave a far better picture of university life, and in fact served probably as a better advertisement than either of them realized for Southampton, as much for the things they chose to emphasize as what they said.  They agreed that there were far fewer lectures than at the Complutense and said that the students were more self-directed and "you spend more time in the library, so you learn how to organize your time."  They also talked about the concept of a "campus model" which has "a pub, and a gym, and cafes, and a cinema all on campus" while blissfully ignorant that the Complutense was an attempt at that by people who weren't quite sure how it was supposed to work.  Perhaps the nicest thing they said was that "you really feel listened to at Southampton, because it's very student-run, so if you don't like something you should get angry and then you can change it.  For example there was a new student union being built and everyone hated it and everyone complained and the design was changed.  So you can make a difference."  This totally un-selfconscious local engagement struck me as a very good advertisement for the school, the more so because of how the girls mentioned it as almost an afterthought at the end of their presentation.

I was obviously far less interesting than fellow students, but I did get to talk a little bit about the concept of the "personal statement" and the particular and horrible genre of explaining in a humble and self-deprecating way why you are awesome and also why the dream of your incredibly awesome and talented life is to spend your time and money at X school.  This is completely foreign to Spaniards, who do everything by exam, and are bemused by the concept of applying "el marketing" (as they call it with a loan word) to themselves.  As I have given advice about this genre before, I was able to give some specific examples of how to be specific.  The professor at the beginning had listed the standard reasons why you should say you want to do an Erasmus year, a technique guaranteed even with the best of students to produce a set of mediocre cloned essays each one saying in nearly the same words that the goal of their Erasmus year is to improve their languages skills, experience living in a new culture, and mature into more confident and open adults.  Snore.  I said that the best thing was to be both honest and specific, because anything that made your essay stand out from the other five hundred that the committee was reading at the same time was helpful.  As the Complutense has a specific exchange program with UNC Chapel Hill, I offered as an example saying that you want to study at Chapel Hill because you became an American Studies major because you have always loved the work of William Faulkner, and want the opportunity to live in the American South to understand his work better.  (Yes, I know Chapel Hill is the research triangle which is hardly Faulkner country, and Faulkner was Mississippi not North Carolina, but how would a Spanish undergraduate know that?  And I know that Faulkner is wildly popular in Spain due to a good translation and syntax that mimics Spanish anyway, as well as having been one of the few cheap editions available right after the war.)  Or saying that you want to do the exchange with the UC system because you are interested in Latinx Studies and how formerly Spanish language literature has developed in the US, and that California is therefore a logical spot for you.  In other words, show you've done some research.  I felt a little bad not having prepared more, since everyone else had elegant power points, but fortunately how to write a personal statement is a speech I can give in my sleep, which is just as well because anyone who forces me to get up at 8:00 AM had better not expect me to give a speech awake.

I think the kids got the general idea, and one of them came and made an appointment with me for next Monday to talk further about Fulbright applications for next year (he's a first year now, so it's premature), and another asked me if I knew anything about similar programs to the Fulbright in Canada because she has family there and they say it's very nice, and she wants to eventually move to Canada and open her own business. She's an entrepreneurial little thing.  Sad that she wants to leave Spain.  Finally a graduate student who had arrived at the tail end of the presentation asked me about the Fulbright, and invited me for coffee, as everyone had left by this time.  I gratefully accepted the coffee, and we chatted.  She is looking to do a PhD in linguistics in the US, after spending a year at UCLA as an exchange student, and wondered if the Fulbright would cover the full PhD.  I told her I wasn't sure, but that PhDs were generally on full stipend anyway in the US, and gave her the information of the Fulbright committee.

After that I retreated to my mentor's office and printed out my afternoon lesson plan, and was going to do thesis work, but then opened my Complutense email and found a note from one of the undergrads in the class I am auditing, asking me for help.  He is one of four American exchange students taking my mentor's class, which is technically a grad-level literature course in Spanish.  So these nice kids with a couple of years of high school and college Spanish are suddenly doing a Master's level seminar in a foreign language.  This is the equivalent of doing a running jump and yelling "cannonball!" and then discovering that what you thought was the deep end of the pool is actually an inlet of the ocean with a pretty strong riptide.  As I have promised to mentor the English-speaking students in the class I sent him a nice reassuring note, and suggested a time we could meet, as well as giving him some background information on the reading, and telling him where he could find it in English.  (It's a long and rather complicated novel, and the professor suggested that those who were struggling read a translation.)

That little extra bit of academic mentoring (as well as study abroad mentoring) done, I headed to do my guest lecture on "Race and the Enlightenment."  Only about eight students showed up, and of those I strongly suspect a number had not done the reading, but two were very verbal and two more made at least a few efforts to talk, although they were shy, and the two girls who were whispering together who I thought weren't paying attention turned out to be copying notes on their tablets when I snuck up behind them, and might just have been conferring about language issues.  (I didn't mean to sneak up on them.  I walked down the aisle of the class to help one boy find the place on the page when he volunteered to read aloud, and then back up the aisle and saw what they had written on their tablets.)  I had prepared five pages of notes, and got through maybe three (or two and a half) a bit out of order, and with me talking much more than the students, but I think that at least I was coherent.  Halfway through my "lecture" (with questions which I tried to make discussion though not successfully) I realized that I was quite a bit more interested in John Locke than in the other features of my lesson, and I ended up trying to sketch out both how Locke was crucial to the US via Jefferson's creative plagiarism, and more generally how Locke is the bedrock of modern "liberalism" in both the economically right-wing and socially left-wing sense of the word.  I also ended up mentioning to the kids that it is largely thanks to the writing of Locke, and his insistence that "land belongs to those who improve it" that the English in the Americas are to this day called "colonists" or "settlers" while the Spanish are called "conquerors" even though of course both empires did both.

In short, while I didn't do as good a job as I wished with the class, it could have been worse, and I would like the chance to teach Locke again.  I have applied to teach Columbia's Contemporary Civilization course next year, which would include Locke, although my first choice was a literature not a philosophy/social science class.  The question is whether the opportunity to teach Locke properly (to mostly native English speakers) would make up for the obligation to teach Kant.  A tough call.

After class I had the sensation, rare since I have started grad school, of going to yoga after several hours of teaching and being out all day, and practicing while completely exhausted.  It requires a special kind of pulling out of energy you didn't know you had to do that, but also lets you have a special kind of slow, steady, rhythm when you're too tired to be frenetic.  After that, I thought I had earned my peaceful evening at home.

All in all, today was a mirror image of my days teaching high school before starting the PhD.  The early morning waking after going to bed too late; the twelve hours away from my apartment with an hour commute home; the college advising mixed with teaching; the yoga at the end of the day while tired.  But I did all of it without the crushing anxiety that I would be harshly graded for so few students showing up for class and so few participating, and for not following my lesson plan to the letter.  And with friendly texts from my mentor thanking me for working with the English language students, rather than snide emails about paperwork left undone, or demands to do something different from what I was doing.  And with students who smiled and thanked me, even when I was not as helpful as I would have wished to be.  Today was what I sometimes imagined teaching would be.  I still miss research (not only because I'm feeling pressured about writing my thesis but also because I really do enjoy the detective work of archives, and also the discipline of writing a longer piece of work - amusing as this blog is to write also).  But if teaching were all this I could maybe bear the missing research.  Or maybe not.  Just as well that I have the opportunity to do research since I enjoy that and am pretty good at it too.  But today was a reminder of a younger me, without the sadnesses and stresses that younger me had to deal with.  So that was kind of nice.