Students

I started teaching yesterday.  We purposely got to Croatia early to get settled in and travel, but we didn't think we'd be arriving quite this far in advance of my semester's beginning!  I was never sure exactly when it was really going to begin (and I sometimes got conflicting reports when I asked).  I learned a couple of weeks ago that what are called elective classes (including mine) start this week.

I am teaching two courses: Women and Gender in American History to 3rd year undergraduates (like seniors in American universities), and Academic Literacy II to master's students.  I found the beginnings to be a lot of fun; the classes had good first-day-of-class energy.  The students appeared interested in what we'll be doing this semester, and importantly to me, they laughed at my jokes!  Even if all of that is just brown-nosing, I'll take it.

Many of my colleagues, along with a number of other people I've met in Rijeka, have explained what they see as the differences between the Croatian and American educational systems, both on the secondary and university levels.  So far, here's what I've been told.  Croatian students:

• Are required to read a lot more great literature and history than their American counterparts, and they've been doing this since they were quite young.
• Cover many more subjects in secondary school than Americans do.
• Are taught to memorize material and spit it back to their teachers and professors.
• Are not encouraged to engage in critical thinking in the way that American students are.
• Are discouraged from giving their opinions, perhaps even based on a careful reading of source material, to their teachers or professors.
• Are not used to class discussions.
• Write very little in high school and college.

Students' comments in both my undergraduate and graduate classes confirmed a number of these things.

Many of my students seemed excited about the opportunity to make arguments in class discussion and in their writing.  I was surprised and pleased that in today's women's and gender history class, the students already engaged in a discussion and at a high level.

I've also been learning more about the university itself.  The university bureaucracy here is quite complicated.  Several students have wished me luck in figuring it out and explained that they still haven't done so!  

Yet, there's also a kind of flexibility here that doesn't exist at American universities.  For example, students here often have what they call "colliding courses," that is, courses that overlap with one another in time.  They sometimes negotiate with their professors to change the times that a course is taught.  Professors get to pick the date and time of their final exam (and they must offer the final at more than one time, in part so that if a student registers for the first exam time and fails, he or she can take it a second time).

Laura