spring semester

And so another semester begins here within the French educational system. I surprised mostly myself at the full spectrum of my emotional experience last semester at the University of Paris. It began at the lowest octaves of abject terror and aversion to the unique oxymoron that is the French “organizational system,” rising to arpeggios of joy culminating in my most amazing students giving me roses during our pilgrimages to cafés fueled by Hemingway’s alcoholism at the end of the semester.

Maybe it was the blunt trauma to the head produced by my encounter with the Kafkian bureaucracy that is the university in France. It is a system which is run primarily with unfathomable, and gleefully unexplained, acronyms. The following is just a modest example:



Maybe it was the weight of my anticipatory riot gear. This was the place, it must be remembered, that just the year before had been incapacitated for weeks due to full-scale student riots, costing millions of euros in structural damage. But it sounds so poetic in French: les émeutes... Stories of fleeing teachers were shared in traumatized whispers that were more reminiscent of refugee camps than classrooms.

French academic calendars are always somewhat aleatory due to this phenomenon of the student body. There is the proud tradition of May ’68 to uphold…











Or maybe it was just the strangeness of doing something so personal as teaching in such a new and different place. Whatever it was, the experience of teaching – and therefore being more fully present in Paris – has been transformative. The fly-by-night pedagogical philosophy which the French seem to prefer has liberated me to engage in wildly discursive debates with my literature students, and therefore, also myself.