I started school on Wednesday. I was terrified to show up to my first lesson, since I was pretty sure I was going to be the only foreign student there, and I was right. However, it was such a terrifying experience. The professor is German, so he speaks Italian slowly, which is great for me. The Italian school year is split into 2 semesters and then each semester is split into 2 modules. Module 1, the one I’m doing right now, I only have 1 class, the only bad things is that the class meets Wednesdays from 8-10, I haven’t had an 8am class in a while, but I bought this really powerful mint gum, which I’ve noticed helps keep me from falling asleep. Thursdays and Fridays class meets from 9-11. The nice thing about the Italian school system is that there are courses that are for the first year and courses for the second year, but you can do them whenever you want. So you could do 1st year courses your 2nd year and vice versa, and you can take as long as you want to finish your degree. So while I should be done in 2 years, theoretically, even though no one ever does, it will probably take ma little longer, since I am going to have extra credits to make up from the equivalent to their bachelors degree, I don’t find out until November how many credits I have to make up. Basically they evaluate my courses I did at UCD and then apply them to the Bachelors degree out here and if there are any classes from the Italian bachelors that I don’t have an equivalent to then I have to make it up out here, so it kind of sucks, but oh well!
I don’t know what it is about Italian students but I have noticed that they don’t really take notes. In 2 class periods I already had like 6 pages of notes, and both times I noticed that the people that sat around me barely filled up 1 page of notes, if that. Do they not care? Do they have really good memories? Or is note-taking not a crucial part of the Italian school system? They must think I am some super anal American because I noticed 2 of the guys sitting around me looking at my notes and raising their eyebrows, like “holy cow”. This class has an American feel to it, because the professor passed out a syllabus and there is like a reading for each lecture, so I am thinking he is new to the Italian school system, where professors don’t really do that. I appreciate it because it makes it easier for me to keep up with the class. The professor said we could either take a normal oral exam or write a paper as our final exam. I asked him if I could write it in English and he said that would be easier for him because it’s easier for him to read English than Italian, and I told him it was easier for me to write in English than in Italian. He asked if I was Italian and I said I wasn’t, that I was American and he was surprised he said that he thought I was Italian and that I speak the language very well, which was nice for me to hear, it made me very happy ☺ So now I just have to see how long he wants the paper to be, because if he wants a 7-page paper, then that’s fine, but if he wants some 15-page paper then it might be more convenient for me to do the oral exam.
Another difference I noticed about the Italian and the American school system is that in my Soc. classes back home concentrated a lot on modern sociologists, I mean we studied Marx, Weber and Durkheim, but not super in depth, and most of the books for my classes were written rather recently. Whereas here most of the reading has more to do with classical sociological theory, which sucks because I’m not very used to it. Like for this class the main text is by a contemporary sociologist named Boudon, but the readings that we use along with it are by classic sociologists like Marx, Weber, Tocqueville, Parsons (not super classical, but not as modern as I’m used to), etc. I kind of noticed this when I studied here a few years ago, but it really hit me when I went through the syllabus and realized yeah I had heard of some of these guys as in, “one of the main theorists in this area was Tocqueville, but we’re not going to study him, we’re going to look at someone more pertinent to today” At Davis many of my professors KNEW the authors of the books we used in class, I definitely can’t say that for the people I’m studying now. It was just a little thing I noticed, but I thought it was really interesting and it makes a big difference in the educational system.
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