One last journey: in the last week I spent in Bologna after returning from Paris, Bianca and I took a trip to Rimini and San Marino. Rimini as a city didn't particularly stand out in my mind, except that it had a beach, which doesn't stick out in my mind among all the various beach's I've seen. San Marino was neat; for those out of the know it's an independent republic within Italy, just like the Vatican. It sits on a mountaintop, and Wikipedia tells me it's the world's oldest state, and that it owes its longevity to the fact that whenever an aggressive Pope or Napoleon came knocking, they simply welcomed them with open arms, made nice, and were allowed to stay. There were great view from the height, and the whole thing is basically a fortress-city built into a mountain. Cool.
The core of this post is devoted to the Italian education system (istruizione means "education," not educazione, which refers to the way a person is raised in terms of things like manners and ethics. Language teachers call traps like that "false friends," and they lead to hilarious mistakes. Most famously, preservativo does not mean "preservative.") I took five courses this semester:
- BCSP's pre-session grammar course
- BCSP's main grammar course
- BCSP's history of Italian politics course
- Unibo's history of the family course
- Unibo's history of the Italian language course
(Unibo = University of Bologna)
I won't talk here about the BCSP courses, as they were more American-style and largely unlike the Italian courses, except for the grading scale. Italy (and Europe in general? I'm not sure) grades on a 0-30 scale, just like they do with their temperatures. My debate club at Cornell does the same thing, so maybe there's a common root there.
The best one-idea summary I can give of the Italian education system is as follows: The students are not part of the university. In America, we definitely consider the students to be a part of any college or university, if not the core of it. Cornell students are considered a part of the university just as much as the faculty. In Italy, the faculty is the university, and the students are merely clients. There is a substantial divide between students and faculty to the point of animosity. Films about Italian college life always portray students up against an unfeeling, egotistic bureaucracy. In class, the professors seem to talk at you, not to you, My history of the family teacher, I eventually realized, was reading practically verbatim from her book. There was no effort to be engaging, their only job is to present information. That isn't to say they aren't sometimes better than that- my history of the language professor was a better lecturer, but more on him in a moment.
The students, not a part of the university, have no sense of class. I don't mean that in that they have no sense of taste or style, I mean that our idea of the "Class of 'XX" has no meaning there. They graduate when they individually finish, not together. I don't believe there are any university-sponsored clubs. The university is simply an institution that provides professors who lecture and offer exams, that is all. You get an email account as a signing bonus. Within this structure, each individual facoltà (schools within the college, like Cornell's) is highly autonomous, and the professors are further autonomous within that structure. We were told by the program that professors were masters of their classes. They decided the schedules, when the exams would be, and the appropriate workload. They were free to begin and end within the allotted time: both my professors never used their full two hours, and frequently showed up late.
Not that you're required to attend class. Your performance in the course is graded entirely on the final exam. You're free to just do the readings, or none at all, and show up as you please. I'm fairly certain one of my roommates never went to class, though he was a science major so the textbooks were probably better than rote lecture. The exam dates are more or less independent of the course's run, and there are several held a year. If you screw up once, you can try again next semester (though "semester" is also a nebulous concept). My family professor seemed to offer an exam session every month, a single block of time during which any students from any of her courses could stop by to take the test. The exam (with exceptions, though both of mine were like this) are oral and incredibly subjective. The professor sits you down and you have a discussion with them about the topic, and then you get your grade.
My exams were a best-case and a worst-case scenario. My history of the family exam was as follows: I was required to read a certain amount of pages from the professor's book and a list of others. I read her book and two others. At the exam, we didn't discuss her book (the content of the lectures) at all, and thank goodness because it was impossible to pay attention to her, and I was more or less free to discuss anything I wished from the books I elected to read. I impressed her and got a good grade.
The history of the language professor was not so kind. He had a separate exam day and reduced reading for the foreign students, and a number of other BCSP students and I studied together for the exam. He asked very, very precise questions about his book. In my case, he started broad (Why is Petrarch important?) before narrowing down to absurd levels of detail (Where was the book we just mentioned published? What was its author's first name?), and we discussed only one part of a single chapter for the whole exam. The professor, now a notorious villain among our circle of students, had a massive ego, a rude temperament, and a grudge against foreign students (despite his separate exam day and lessened workload). I escaped with a respectable grade: I was told that I clearly knew the content and had studied, but didn't speak the language well enough, which has nothing to do with his course. The man was a linguistic egomaniac. Others were clearly treated extremely unfairly, graded based on his mood or their appearance (that happens to girls a lot, the culture is quite sexist). Upon hearing of our problem, our program director spoke to him and somehow managed to touch the heart of the Grinch and get us all a grade boost.
The Italian education system works as follows: they don't teach you very well, and then they roll a die for your grade. You may be asked anything; if you've memorized every sentence in a book except for the one you're asked about, you'll get a bad grade. Apparently this creates problems at med schools, as some unprepared students retake exams until they get a question they know and are then allowed to move forward int eh medical field. The method's only good quality is the amount of detail I had memorized for the exams: I haven't studied that hard or known a course's material so well since I took the AP exams in high school. Of course, all that's gone now, but I've still got the books.
The next post will be a bit more positive, I promise. The Unibo way of teaching might be the only dark spot in the whole experience.
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