Settling In

The first couple weeks of travel and orientation with the students have come to an end, and everyone is settling into something like a routine. Registration is complete and classes have officially begun.

Life in the flat involves assigning chores to everyone and my seeing that they are accomplished. It also means that the students have begun taking turns doing the cooking for our communal evening meals. Some have never spent much time in a kitchen at all. None have ever cooked for 14 people before. We've already had some "interesting" experimental meals thus far, but no one has been left starving. This will get better with experience, and with Mary's helpful guidance.

Registration for classes took place this week. It was a somewhat frustrating experience for our students, who are used to logging onto a website, seeing immediately what courses are offered, the times and places, and simply choosing from a menu until their schedule is complete. Here, it is a much more person-to-person process of going to meet with a faculty member, chatting about options, and in some cases being more or less told what to take. Nothing is online. And since British students usually only take courses in their major subject area, for our students who need to take courses in several different disciplines, it meant several meetings and different sets of rules in each department. But everyone is now registered, most for both the fall semester and for spring.

Few students had classes the first day or two. One went to a class where all of the students showed up but the instructor did not. So for most, that exciting first day of class is yet to take place. Classes meet less frequently at British universities, there is much more independent reading, the semester is much shorter, and there is generally only one paper and/or exam at the end of the term which is the entire grade for the course. This will be an adjustment for our students, who are used to starting earlier, meeting two or three times a week, and having lots of assignments due and quizzes to take throughout the semester. Some of them are nervous about it. I think they all should be. It's not unheard of (or even unusual) for American students with very high grade point averages to fail a course or two here because of the different style and expectations.

I am responsible for three courses for our students. The first, a year-long course based on their travels around Britain, has already begun with our first two trips and reflection some papers due. My responsibility has been to arrange all of the travel and grade the reflection papers -- different than teaching a regular course, but a lot of work, nonetheless, especially in the travel details. The second course is a fall term only class on British culture. Since I'm not exactly an expert on that, the course is primarily a series of guest speakers. My job, of course, has been arranging all of those, selecting readings to go along with each speaker, and of course, grading a lot of papers (this British notion of only one paper and/or exam per semester is looking more and more appealing from the instructor's point of view!). The third course is in my area of expertise, but won't begin until spring.

The students seem comfortable and content. They are getting around Nottingham easily on the bus system. They seem to have discovered that Nottingham is a huge shopping mecca, and even put on a "fashion show" for each other last night to model their new purchases (guys as well as gals -- even though one of the guys has only bought a pair of gym shorts thus far). The all-time record high temperatures have even made the weather cooperative. The students organized a good old-fashioned American bar-b-que in the church yard yesterday. This morning, we all attended church together at the English Lutheran service, where the congregation hosted a welcome pot-luck for us after the service. All in all, we're off to a great start.