Classes, Greek Style

Since classes started yesterday and I've now been to all five of mine, I thought I'd share a picture of the Arcadia Center (it's a converted apartment building) and a few of my thoughts on the courses I'm taking. They're definitely rather different from what I was expecting, but I think it should be an interesting semester. The classes are all very small: my largest is about 12 people.

Introduction to Greek Philosophy: This class meets at 8AM on Mondays and Wednesdays, and somehow that seems even earlier than it normally would when you have to drag yourself out of bed half an hour before you want to shower to turn on the hot water heater. Despite that, the professor seems wonderful so far. His name is Kostas (we call all our professors by their first names here) and he mentioned off-handedly that he has a degree in environmental engineering and hydrology in addition to a Ph.D in philosophy. He's an extremely engaging lecturer and is encouraging us to really engage with the material -- we're only reading primary texts. It does seem like it's going to require a fair amount of reading, and we have to write weekly reflection papers on the material we read, as well as two larger papers.

Greek Key: This class is rather unique and doesn't have all that much structure. We have to choose a project to work on over the course of the semester that helps us to become more familiar with and involved in the city. It can be anything from researching Athenian pop music to adopting a neighborhood and going to observe it regularly to interviewing someone about their life story and placing it in a historical context to volunteering at a non-profit in the city to studying organic farming in Greece. It's extremely varied and I'm torn between trying to choose something to use towards my thesis and taking the opportunity to do something I've always wished I had time for at home but never managed to make time for. In addition, we take walks through various neighborhoods and post our observations, write about any of our first experiences, and learn to be conscious observers of the culture. It's a good excuse to get out into the city, but also seems like a lot of work for how many credits it is (half that of my other courses).

Modern Greek: It's very exciting to be learning Greek, especially when I can actually go out and use just about everything I've learned immediately. We're still working on basic survival phrases at the moment, such as how to order food and coffee, make polite conversation, and do a basic introduction of ourselves. Sometimes, it can be a little frustrating to hear, "we'll talk about that later" almost every time a question is asked that involves grammar, but it's also nice to be learning such useful things. My professor, Apostolos, is on the younger side (he's 32) and is a great resource for interesting things to do in Athens as well as language skills. We're meeting at a coffeeshop in downtown Athens for our next class so we can try out our newly acquired cafe vocabulary.

Nature Conservation in Greece and the EU: This class seems like it will be a lot more interesting than I was expecting. From the syllabus, it seemed rather heavily focused on the "let's save the sea turtles" type of environmental studies, which is very different from the type of environmental studies I focus on at home. However, I'm feeling much more excited about the class after meeting the professor. He has a very interesting story and has worked for NGOs for a number of years, primarily one that focuses on sea turtle rescue. However, in the past year or so, he began working for one of the Greek banks, as part of their environmental department. Hearing him say that definitely made me interested in looking at US banks to see if similar departments exist (and possibly offer internships). Dimitrios is ethincally Greek, but speaks English with an Australian accent because he was born there. I was a bit confused to hear phrases like "When do you knock off?" and the constant ending of sentences with "Yeah?" at first, but now it's just a nice change of pace. We're also going to be talking about global warming and its affects on conservation in the class. I had no idea Greece was such a biological hotspot, but once we talked about how different species tend to evolve when an organism becomes stuck on an island, it began to make a lot of sense. Greece also has a great deal more climatic zones than we typically think of: everything from little sandy islands to tall snowy mountains. This is the class I'm most excited about, especially because he seems very interested in giving us a varied experience and bringing in guest lecturers and such.

Athens On Site: I'm not sure what to make of this class yet. When I signed up for it, I was very excited about it, as it meets out in Athens rather than in a classroom, and gives the students a chance to visit a number of sites around the city, particularly some of the lesser-known ones. However, after having class today, I'm beginning to realize some of the downfalls of being right there: it's harder to take notes that make sense, a camera is really a necessity, your feet start to get tired, and it's difficult to hear if your professor speaks softly. There is also a huge amount of reading for this course, as well as twice-weekly essays about the site we will be visiting during the class period. To give you an idea, right now I've downloaded 2 36 page "picture-books" with detailed text about the Agora and 9 pages of Pausanias' description of Athens. I still have to get one chapter of one book and 15 chapters of another, and all of this is for class on Thursday, along with a 2 page essay on the role of the Agora in Greek life. Half the reading is online, but the other half is on reserve at the library and there's only one copy for the 12 of us to share. Photocopying is an option, but it's expensive, especially when the excerpts are so long. It definitely makes me miss e-reserve at Georgetown! I haven't really started the reading yet or figured out exactly what the essay expectations are, so I'm trying to keep an open mind, especially because I've heard this is one of the very best courses offered at the Center.

Overall, I'm still excited about my classes, although it's looking like a lot more work than I was expecting. I'm glad a few of my classes force me to get out into the city because I'm not sure how much of that I would manage to do if I wasn't in them: already, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by everything I have to do, especially coming from a semester where I only wrote 2 or 3 extremely short essays that were more along the lines of "share your personal opinion" than "analyze in a scholarly manner."