Classes started this week. I’m finally officially matriculated and I can tell it’s going to be a full semester. I was going to try and write down here some of the classes that I’m taking - but in translation and explanation it seems to sound like I’m only taking things I’ve had before, but that’s not quite true. Some it’s more advanced versions of some things, review of some things, and since I’m switching academic systems there’s also just a bit here and there that I need to repeat just to satisfy the official requirements. Some courses I am only going to take and turn in the homework for but I don’t need to take the exam, since I already have a grade for it from Mills. And so on and so forth.
But the point is, I’m taking (in varying degrees of depth - i.e. lecture, homework, exams) four math courses and one computer science course. The very first class this week was one that I think will be quite difficult, but also probably one of my favorites. An Algebra course. Now, I’ve had some Algebra at both Mills and in Budapest, but I can tell from the first week that the pace in this course is quite different. We’re going to cover what I already know (or knew when I was in those other courses!) within the first few weeks, and then it will be all new after that. That lecture is at 8 a.m., twice a week. When I sat down in the first lecture on Monday, I had flashbacks of studying here three years ago.
I remember the enormous theater-style lecture halls, the multiple blackboards that slide up by twisting various knobs near the chalk tray at the bottom. I remember the professors actually carrying around huge sponges that they wet in the sink near the blackboards and use them to completely wipe the board clean, then use the enormous squeegee to get rid of the excess water. And I remember the pecking order of the rows in the hall.
There are at least twenty-five rows of seats, two aisles, in the steeply sloped hall. About 80 students in a lecture. No one sits in the first row. Are you crazy? You’d be like five feet from the lecturer. That makes no sense. Plus, when the blackboards are slid up to the top of their tracks so that folks in the back could see, you’d have to crane your neck to read. The second row? I hate to be so harsh, but I’m only reporting what I see (and this is often the case with American students as well). The second row is full of guys who happen to be paradoxically long-haired and balding at the same time, all while being in their early twenties. Some of them are using fountain pens and get the ink all over their hands, they have the homework done before it’s been assigned, etc. Oh, and there are also sometimes girls who wander into the lecture hall late, looking like they forgot they signed up for a math class, and then when all the other seats are taken, they end up sitting next to these characters. The third row is for people who want to pay attention but aren’t quite up to the level of nerdity necessitated by those second-row seats. After the third row, all bets are off. There, devoted students are mixed with those who are just fulfilling some distribution requirement to those who are taking this course for the third time after having failed it twice.*
As for me - what’s your guess?
On the second day of that particular lecture (Wednesday) I slid into an empty seat in the third row (did you guess right?) and hear some of the Row 2-ers talking in front of me about the homework (which at that point had only been posted online for about twelve hours). They were already done, discussing the subtleties of the last two proofs. I, meanwhile, had printed out the sheet, jotted down a few notes for each problem and had a solid plan for at least two, but hadn’t written any up in their entirety. So, I felt a little sheepish, worrying that I wasn't at the same level as the rest of the class. All of a sudden, from the row behind me, I heard the low voices of two guys, barely awake at this 8 a.m. class:
‘You here those two up there? Are they talking about the homework?”
—“Yeah, I think so. They’re already done.”
“What? Jeez… I haven’t even printed it yet.”
—“I know, me neither. God, they’re motivated.”
“I know. Horrible, right?”
I smiled to myself. I think I’m sitting in the right row.
——
After managing the first four days of the week (where all my classes are scheduled, though some homework is due on Friday) and finishing two of the first four homework assignments, I was feeling good, but exhausted. Thursday evening I went to babysit - not the two girls I’ve talked about before, but a young boy (5) and his younger sister (3.5). Both of them already are learning to speak both Russian and German because of their parents, and their knowledge of English is very limited (understandably!) . The boy has learn the words to some children’s songs, such as Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, etc. Neither one of them understands all the words to these songs, but they sing along anyway - the boy knowing fairly well how to pronounce everything but his sister just throws caution to the winds. When a kids version of ‘Yellow Submarine’ came on, the sister was singing loud enough for me to understand ‘sumbasine’ ‘tubmarine’ and even ‘subtartine’ during the course of the song.
The boy is a real mathematical mind - you can tell already. The way he builds with blocks, they fascinated way he stares at the rubics cube in their playroom, and - the one thing really on his level at the moment - when he plays cards. Right now, the card games we can manage together are Uno and War. I do believe we played about 30 games of Uno on Thursday. It started with him saying just the names of the numbers or the colors when he put his cards down, but then after playing for an hour and hearing me talk about the game, during the last hand when he kept getting a bunch of +4 cards from me (he can take it :) ) he finally exasperatedly held up his tiny hands full of the cards and said “Too many cards!!!”. Considering he didn’t know the word ‘card’ at the start of the game, I thought this was pretty successful. And after the week of classes and bureaucratic errands at the university, Uno was about as complicated a game as I could handle anyway, so we made a great team.
*If I haven’t mentioned it before, failing a class is something completely different here in Germany. Your grade in a course is determined entirely by your grade on the final exam. You are required to score a particular amount of points on the homework to be allowed to take the exam, but other than that, your homework doesn’t count for anything. Also, to make things more interesting, those who write the homework problems are traditionally TAs, the same ones who run the weekly workshops where that homework is due. But the person who writes the exam? The professor. Do you know how the professor likes to write problems before then? No. Also, are people paying exorbitant amounts of money to take these classes? No. So do they kick and scream and fuss (or do parents kick and scream and fuss) when students get grades below an A? No. You don’t need to study math to combine the above facts and come up with the result that failure is not an uncommon outcome in a course. Because of that, though, the attitude around failure is also quite different - you’re not expected to be perfect. Very few people (but some) get grades equivalent to 'A's in math. However, I’m coming into this system with my US-grade mindset, and thus I find the system frankly terrifying.
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