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Overseas teaching: the dream, the joys, the problems
К содержанию номера журнала: Вестник КАСУ №1 - 2005
Автор: Элмерс Д.
The questions I am most frequently asked by the students I have had
in Russia and Kazakhstan are always the same. “Why are
you here? Why do you want to teach here? Wouldn’t you rather be at home? Why
are you dong this?” The answers are not easy to explain. When I was a young
soldier in the years after World War II I was stationed for a few years in Berlin,
before the city was divided by a wall in the 1960’s. I became very interested in the East German university
students (most particularly the girls) because they were about my age, and I
had never been to a university. Also they were studying Russian and not
English, and I had to use what little German I knew to communicate, and that
was good for me because I was trying hard to learn German.
I made some good friends, and although I
dared not visit their university we spent much time together in bars and cafes
and on weekends. They were supposedly all communists, although some said they
were not, but we concerned ourselves with music, dancing, drinking, sports,
etc., and not politics. Most of them, however, embraced the Soviet
anti-religious, atheistic philosophy, with which I did not agree. However, I
didn’t know enough German to argue, so we had good times together.
In 1994, after practicing law for many years as an attorney in
Alaska, I decided I needed a vacation, and I returned eagerly to Berlin and the
former DDR, (East Germany) to see friends still living and to visit and travel
to places that were forbidden to me when I was there so many years before. There
I could now visit Berlin’s Humboldt University that my friends had attended and where I could not have gone
before, as it was now a free open university drawing students from all over Germany and Europe.
I was free to sit in the libraries and to walk the hallways and
campus and chat with the students who were so much like my young friends of
almost a half century before. It was a deeply moving and emotional experience
for me. I wondered if these young people had the same atheistic attitudes and
suspicions of the western world that my young friends had in the years gone by.
Some years later, as I was closing my law practice to retire at the end of the
1990’s, I thought of those young students and I wondered if perhaps I could
instruct at some university or law school in East Germany or Eastern Europe. Unfortunately
I found there were no openings for American
instructors who spoke poor German, but I did learn that some Russian
universities wanted English speaking instructors. To me that was an intriguing
opportunity – a chance to visit a country and to meet people where I never
dreamed I would be able to go. After two challenging and interesting years teaching
in St. Petersburg, I returned to Germany to instruct for a branch of an
American University there attended by American military personnel and their
family members. Later, when most of my students had gone to Iraq, I looked for another job,
and my friend Bill Bontrager told me about KAFU and Ust Kamenogorsk. So here I am.
I am frequently asked for my opinions about
the students I teach, and what differences I have found between students in Russia,
Kazakhstan or America. As for the younger undergraduate students I have taught in
St. Petersburg and here, they are not significant. They are usually
far more interested in the girl or guy sitting next to them than they are in
the instruction that I am giving, and this is equally true in
America. I also found that some of the male students were not
as interested in their studies as the females were because they were attending
the university primarily to avoid or delay their required military service. It
was no different when I began my university studies in America
in the late 1960’s. I had already been in the army for 20 years and
like the other older male students, I had no further military obligation. (The
average age of students in many US universities is older than here.) However,
we could well understand why the younger students wished to avoid this burden
that had been imposed on their older brothers and fathers, and we were not
concerned with their lack of interest so long as it did not interfere with our
studies.
I have also noticed that generally speaking
(but not always) women have less difficulty in mastering foreign languages than
men. I think that is because we men are too prideful. A famous American author
and humorist, Mark Twain, once said “It is better to remain silent and be
thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt.” But Mark Twain never
had to master a foreign language. If he had, he probably would not have said
that. (I find that the best way to make my students laugh in my classes is to
say something in Russian!) Speaking out, making mistakes and looking foolish is
essential to progress in a new language, and women are much more willing to be
laughed at than men.
The most significant difference between
American and Kazakh or Russian students is in the area of competition. Most
American students compete fiercely with one another, and few students will
assist another to get a good grade or pass a test unless they are close
personal friends, and sometimes not even then. Unfortunately many are much more
concerned with getting a good grade and maintaining a high “grade-point
average” and class standing than they are about really learning the subject
matter. But it is true that competition encourages excellence, and employers
know that students that tried and studied hard will do the same in their future
endeavors, and they select the top graduates accordingly. Law students who
graduate in the top 5 or 10% of their class are often immediately hired by
large law offices at rates of pay higher than many of their classmates will
ever achieve in their entire careers. But of course there is much more to
education and intellectual maturity than just high test scores. Some critics
say that our system produces not scholars and thinkers, but only expert test
takers, or worse yet, “educated fools”. Ум без разума беда!
On the other hand my students at St. Petersburg and here display commendable loyalty to and concern
for their classmates. They want the whole class to continue on with no one left
behind, and the most competent students do not hesitate to help or even provide
exam answers for those who seldom attended classes or took any interest in the
instruction. I try to commend and reward the best students because I believe it
provides incentives for hard work and encourages excellence, but I find high
achievers that are embarrassed by this and fear their classmates may resent
their accomplishments. I admire such humility and loyalty to friends, but it
can have a negative effect on your education. In America
there are many thousands of universities, but historically surveys
indicate that the majority of our national leaders in business, industry, the
professions, and government come from a distinct minority of these institutions
that have traditionally set and maintained high standards of student performance.
These are the universities that attract the most applicants, whose diplomas are
the most valued, and whose graduates are offered the best employments.
Here in Kazakhstan universities emerging in the free market economy since the end of the
Soviet era are building their reputations in the here and now, on the
accomplishments of their graduates and the performance of their present
students. Don’t let your university down!
In closing I want to dwell on one problem
that I see more of here than in any other university where I have attended or
taught, and that is poor class attendance by some undergraduate students. I
have known of university courses where students might pass their exams and the
course without attending the classes, provided they diligently study the
textbook and required reading, complete their written assignments, and appear
for their exams. But here we usually have no textbooks, and virtually all the
information you get about a subject comes from the instructor’s classroom presentations.
If you are not there you lose your opportunity to learn and delay the progress
of the others who do attend.
Your family, this university, your
government and a merciful God have provided this time in your life to devote
entirely to study. Most of you are not expected to hold a job or support your
parents, and you are exempted from mandatory government or military service. But
of course you are tempted by the freedoms of young adulthood. You want to earn
some money, engage in sports, perhaps buy a car, clothes, and to pursue a man
or woman that you find attractive. But the time for study is now. 5 or 6 years
from now most of you will have a demanding job, a wife or husband and possibly
children, bills and taxes to pay, and you will find it difficult or impossible
to go back to school to study the things you should have learned but did not. The
good Lord gives us only one life to live. There is no chance for a second time
around to correct our mistakes.
Our world today is an ever-expanding competitive
market place for workers, professionals, and business and industrial leaders. Workers
in the US and the developed nations of western Europe are discovering to their
dismay that in spite of whatever their governments try to do, they no longer
have the abundant employment opportunities and hopes for prosperity that they
once had, simply because they are now competing with millions of workers
worldwide who will work harder for less pay than they do. So what about the
world of university graduates who strive for management, professional and
leadership positions? Multinational corporations and growing businesses today
are drawing their entry level management and professional personnel from a
world market place of qualified graduates, often with little regard to their
nationalities. You may find yourself competing with graduates of foreign
world-class universities who were compelled to perform, compete and excel. How
well then will you do, if in your university you often skipped classes, ignored
study assignments, and never passed or did well in many courses you took?
Permit me to close with a much-overworked
English idiom. The bottom line is that the real value of the
diploma you receive here will depend on the study and effort you put in to
obtain it.
К содержанию номера журнала: Вестник КАСУ №1 - 2005
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