Endings always sneak up on me without much warning, or maybe it’s just that I miss the warnings. My time here is very slowly drawing to a close. My probable last international trip is this weekend, to Stockholm. The last week of classes draws near, too—the last academic paper is being put off until I return from Sweden. I don’t know what it is I ought to be doing to ensure I’m making the most of my dwindling time here. This is hardly a new problem—I spent my last days in New York last winter simultaneously writing papers and pitying myself for having to spend my last days in New York writing papers.
It’s unfortunate, or at least ironic in the Alanis Morissette sense, that I’m leaving here just as I grow accustomed to the ways that life here works, the subtle differences that I managed to overlook the first few weeks when I was more perplexed by the hail falling 15 minutes out of every hour. For instance, I’ve grown used to the four hours of class weekly. It hardly seems like a problem to only have to go to class two days out of the week, but finding ways to occupy myself was, at first, between tricky and boggling. I spent hours very slowly writing very short stories in my dorm room, or watching The Simpsons online to fall asleep and to wake up and to kill time in between, or wandering into town for a lamb kebab and a view of the sea. I found myself wondering what the platonic ideal of Scotland was—what I could be doing, and reporting back to friends and Spec readers—that would both be and appear the empirically best use of my time.
I at least knew I was using my time well in class, though some things were lost in translation. My first week, a professor asked his students to report their “interests” on a questionnaire, to which I wrote “moviegoing and tennis (as a spectator!).” I then had to endure the professor’s reading aloud my classmates’ interests in poetry and critical theory, before coming to those of the dense American. No other tennis fans. And a student/”tennis spectator (!)” who uses quotation marks as a device as much as I do has found ‘inverted commas’ a tough pill to swallow.
Still, I have relished the opportunity to take classes at a university so different than Columbia. St Andrews wears its prestige differently than does our alma mater—the students here are less inclined to quote Lacan in service of a casual conversational point, though they all seem fearsomely well read. St Andrews lacks Columbia’s metric of who’s scoring points with the professor.
Perhaps it’s that the professors seem less interested in hearing from every member of the class—there’s far more deference to the authority of the professor at the expense of each student having his or her say moment by moment. I’ve rarely had lectures that felt quite so much like being lectured or discussion sections at which students were not, with a TA’s guidance, expected to set the tone of conversation. At my ‘tutorial’ here, my professor himself does not hesitate to tell us when he disagrees with our assessments, and seeks to teach us by telling us facts and context rather than through Columbiesque, circling discussions among the students. With so much to learn about and from the teaching style here, it’s hard to feel too guilty about my mistaking academic interests for how I like to entertain myself. Perhaps it provided a moment of cultural exchange.
It’s hard to question, now, that I spend my time in the best way I know how, if not the best of all possible ways. I’ve learned a great deal in my classes about subjects that never managed to interest me before—poetry, for instance, just seems more interesting when I’m being taught it in a more didactic manner than when I’m forced to form an opinion of it with little contextual knowledge. I’ve managed to find new ways to spend the time outside of class, too, and haven’t been to The Simpsons episode database in a month. On a recent night out, I drank cheap Scottish beer with a Glaswegian friend and explained that the lispy one is the main “presenter” on The View, and that she fired Star Jones for lying about her gastric bypass. (I may not myself be ‘fearsomely well-read,’ but I know my Audition!). More than classes, perhaps, and certainly more than ‘inverted commas,’ this is the sort of cultural exchange I’ll remember, and as I slowly become aware that the semester is coming to an end, it’s the sort I’ll seek out, even now that my time documenting my Scottish sojourns has ended.
Daniel D’Addario is a Columbia College junior majoring in American studies. He is spending the semester at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The State I Am In runs alternate Fridays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com