Monday I go to KU Med for the whole battery of tests: blood work, full-body x-rays, barium-laced drink, CT scans, and finally my $12,000 shot to strengthen the bones.  Usually we have the consultation with the oncologist the same day, but because of scheduling problems, we go back Friday to discuss the results.  I feel as if I've remained on the same plateau as during the last several months--the same ups and downs--but who knows what's going on on the inside?  Since there won't be anything to report till next Friday, I'll do a couple of blogs about teaching abroad and some of the problems with the university systems there, problems that make our system look healthy indeed.

I do want to say, however, that the four years I taught abroad, three in poor countries (Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Morocco), were among the happiest years of my life.  The people were unfailingly welcoming and generous, the students were usually eager and enthusiastic, and I loved the immersion in the different cultures and languages.  Always a sucker for compliments, I still remember the clerk at the post office in Skopje, Macedonia, who asked me, when I was sending packages home and trying to communicate in Macedonian, "When did your parents leave Macedonia?"  Little did she know I'd hang on to that remark 32 years later. 

My year in Metz, France, was the only year that wasn't a Fulbright.  This was 1987-88, i.e. pre-Internet.  I decided I wanted to teach in France, so wrote to the French embassy for a list of universities that taught American literature and studies.  I wrote to all the names that they sent and got two offers: one in Caen, the other in Metz.  I knew nothing about either city, but I looked at maps (the old-fashioned way: by going to the library), and the university in Metz was located on an island at a confluence of two rivers, a site which seemed picturesque to me, so off to Metz I went.  One of the things I've learned is that, especially for the Fulbrights, you are expected to write a long description of the courses you would offer and why they would be important, and then once you get there, you teach whatever they need.  In Metz, I taught a one-semester course for first-year students in which we spent the entire semester reading Jack London's Call of the Wild.  Since outside America, universities do not teach general education courses, when you go to the university to study English, that's all that you study.  The curriculum--courses, teachers, times--is prescribed for all students.  That meant that whatever their previous degree of preparation, all first-year students are in the same classes: those with years of English classes mixed with those who had few or none.  Moreover, the French have two different kinds of tests: examens, which are like most American tests with a fixed point for passing (as 60% or 75% may be on a test here), and concours, which are like, say, the bar examinations: each state determines a certain percentage who will pass.  The passing score may vary wildly from state to state.  At our university in Metzs, 50% of the first-year students passed, so those students who had little experience had almost no chance of making it into the top 50%.  It was discouraging to try to help those students who simply weren't going to make the cut.

I also taught a course called Langue orale.  This class met in the language lab where absolutely nothing worked.  We studied such important matters as how to tell the difference between American, Irish, Scottish, and English accents--something I never mastered myself.  For the American accent, we used an old Mike Nichols-Elaine May routine in which they talked in exaggerated New York Jewish accents.  The sketch was funny, but hardly seemed typical.  We also used a book that delineated eight degrees of stress in English speech, and we'd go through sentences putting little numbers above each syllable.  My numbers never coincided with those in the answer key.  Ironically, Langue orale was the only course that had a written exam as opposed to all the others that had oral finals.  And despite my halting efforts, most of the students actually passed, a fact that irritated the regular teacher of the course who was proud of the number of students who failed each semester.  (Another professor was equally proud of the low grades he gave.  The French system is 0-20 with 11 needed to pass.  No one ever gets above 17--there's no grade inflation in France--and 16s and 17s are rare.  Prof. Springer was famous for giving out numerous 0.5s as grades.)

But most of my time was spent preparing students for the locally administered Master's, which was tested orally, and the national exams, the CAPES and Agregation, which were written tests given in Paris, one on anglophone literature, the other on anglophone culture.  For the tests on literature, every student in France in 1987-88 prepared the same four books, and if everyone who has ever read this blog got together to guess the four books that represented the entire history of American and British literature, I doubt if even one title would be right.  Here they are: Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, selected poems (maybe 30 or 40) from The Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Grace Paley's slim volume of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man.  This seemed a mighty peculiar list to me, but that's what someone in Paris had chosen.  Since there are no tests or papers other than the final, most students put off studying throughout the first semester (their rationale is that they don't want to forget what they learned), and then there were vacations, and then it was still too early, and then, about April, panic set in.  Moreover, they were going to be tested on only one of the four books, and the one they feared most was MacNeice, but since they had only a 25% chance of being tested on him and since my class met the first semester on Saturday mornings, almost no one attended.  (I did some make-up sessions during the second semster, and they had better attendance.)  I had prepared the students on all the writers except Maugham; that was done by a prof. from Paris who came once a month to deliver her lectures.  The day of the exams, she didn't show up (no one seemed surprised or upset by this), so we took Maugham off the table, or rather, out of the hat.  The exam worked like this: the students would arrive and draw the name of one of the four authors (though it was only three authors, a fact we didn't tell the students) out of a (figurative) hat.  And then they would draw a second slip with one of several passages I had selected for each writer, go away for 30 minutes to prepare an explication de texte of that passage, and then return for a 30-minute oral exam with me as the only judge.  Luck was not on the students' side that day, and five of the six drew MacNeice.  One student cried for the entire thirty minutes of her exam.  I would say, "You don't have to do an explication.  Just start by telling me what you think of MacNeice."  She cried.  "Just describe some of his main ideas or techniques, and then we can look at some specifics."  She cried.  Sad as it was, I failed her.  In fact, I failed five of the six candidates.  I felt awful, but they had shown no understanding of the material.  A couple of weeks later, one of the students called me and said the six would like to have a small party for me and give me a gift.  "Do I dare open the package?" I asked.  But they harbored no grudges, and we had a small get-together with a souvenir of Metz for me.

The subject of the exams in anglophone culture that year for every student in France was American Foreign Policy and Expansionism: 1885-1908.  In 45 years of teaching, I've never felt like such a fraud as I did teaching that course.  Luckily, for once, I knew in advance what I was going to teach, so I lugged a number of books with me and prepared madly.  But if a student asked me about something in 1903 when I hadn't read that far ahead, I was in danger of being exposed.  Every Wednesday night, 30 students from Nancy would take the train to Metz and join 30 students from my university.  They would seat themselves and take out some blank paper (the European paper for students has not only many horizontal lines, but also regularly spaced vertical lines, the purpose of which I never understood) and a pencil box like the one I carried in third grade.  They would remove and line up blue, black, and red pens and pencils, an eraser, a small bottle of White-Out, and a ruler.  Then all 60 of them would write the name of the course and the date and underline it, using the ruler.  And then they'd be ready to write down everything I said.  I asked the department chairman once why I was teaching this course, and he said that he was sure I had something unique to bring to it.  So one night, I decided to talk about how American literature during this period reflected expansionism and internationalism.  No one wrote down anything: this was clearly material that wasn't going to be on the test.  There were no texts for the students; the recommended text had long been out of print.  I had trouble (in the pre-Internet days) finding a copy in the U.S., so none of the students had it.  What they did have were my notes and a collection of essays by French professors.  A group of perhaps eight French professors wrote articles on the subject (and hence could claim publication), collected them, and sold them to students all over the country.  One of my colleagues who was grading the essays of the CAPES and Agregation complained that they all sounded alike.  But since every student had read the same eight essays, how could they expect a different result?  None of the students took the master's exam in Metz, and I never learned how my students did on the national exams.  It was probably better that I didn't.

The students were extremely nice, and I enjoyed them very much.  But the system itself was so narrow and inflexible that teaching was frustrating, not only for me, but also for the French professors who complained incessantly about their oppressive workload and the poor quality of the students.  Since none of the professors published, since they never met with students or had papers to grade, and since they taught the same classes and gave the same lectures over and over, I wasn't terribly sympathetic.  No professor kept office hours (when I announced mine, the students didn't know what I meant).  There were no papers or exams until the finals, and much then depended on chance and on individual teachers' whims.  There were no appeals and few second chances.  Even for a devoted francophile like me, I found the French university system stifling and unforgiving.