I'm crushed. Three days before departure and I got the class list. Only 14 people signed
up. My colleague who taught last spring
had 25. Maybe it’s the timing of the
seminar, so soon before the Christmas holiday?
Or the topic? Will my chef
d’oeuvre on the U.S. court system be viewed by only 14 students?
Take a deep breath; this is not all about you, said my other
voice. With fewer people, there will be more
opportunity for spontaneity, for discussing other topics, for being flexible
with the outline. There will be more
cohesion (perhaps) and a greater likelihood of student participation in
question-and-answer and in projects. For
the others who didn’t sign up: their loss!
Perhaps they will want to audit—if such a thing occurs in European
universities.
In reviewing the class list, I spot one clearly Indian name,
one Finnish, one Russian. I recognize
several names as Latvian but others could be either Russian or Latvian. Too bad I bought 30 souvenir pens! That was a month or so ago during a special
trip to midtown Manhattan to hunt souvenirs.
It would have been risky to wait for the last minute on that particular
chore. CILS expects us to hand out souvenirs to the
students and gifts to the professor, a kind of goodwill exercise to keep the
universities interested in the CILS program.
That’s my take on it. No, I’m not
cynical; I’m just a realist. The gift to
the professor I can understand, since the university is putting me up at its
cost, but really, giving students a gift for attending one’s class? I suppose I
can give some of them as random gifts—Slava’s grandkids, for example
The gifts make it a challenge to pack. I could’ve stuffed in several more shirts,
even another coat maybe, if I hadn’t had to schlep heavy gift books. Oh well.
If I need anything, I can probably buy it in Riga. Wow—what a fraught statement that is. When I traveled to the Baltics in the old
Soviet days, one could never, ever rely on buying any necessary
replacement or extra item. Amazing what
times we’ve lived through!
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