The school system here is so very different. For the entire 'first week' of classes I felt so scattered and confused, and I think I sufficiently frustrated the registrar and my advisor back at Colby as well. You see, visiting students at University College Cork get to "test out" classes during the first week of term. In other words, you just pick classes that you think would interest you and go check them out. It isn't until after the first week of classes that you actually sign up for anything. So the Step Dancing, Set Dancing, and Greek Mythology classes that I went to that first week, I'm not even taking anymore. I dropped them all to take a seminar called Intertextuality in Jane Austen instead. (Way more Chelsea-esque).
I'm also taking two Celtic Civilization classes: Irish Historical Tales and Irish Vision Tales. And in these classes, 100% of my grade is made up of ONE in class essay at the end of the term. I don't have to write any papers in the meantime, nor do I have any other sort of work to do. The professor said that a few years back, plaugerism was so bad that they eliminated all take home essays. Isn't it a little bit odd that instead of kicking the kids who plagiarized out of school and enforcing a more intense code of ethics the school decided to stop assigning essays at all? It reminds me of the trashy novel Schooled that we all passed around in Ecuador. In the book a young teacher discovers that all the assignments she gives her students they in turn hand to their tutors, who obviously get paid bank by the child's wealthy parents to write middle school level essays. So she resorts to having them do the reading at home and do all their writing and course work in class. But has a college system really had to resort to the same thing? It's awfully sad to think that students moral codes are so ... well, non-existent.
Despite that whole fiasco, teachers here really do expect you to take advantage of your education. You can either embrace the classes and learn the material or you can coast by (and trust me, they make the class plenty easy for coasting). The first day of class we are given a 'bibliography' with suggested readings on it. If you choose to do the secondary reading, the idea is that your paper will be substantially better, but you aren't actually required to do any of it, and we only briefly touch on it in class. I suppose this is all fine and good, but I have to admit that at Colby when a teacher lectures on a secondary source, I'm far more likely to understand and retain it than when I just read it myself. So, I'm kind of missing that.
A few more interesting things on colleges here:
a) Law is an undergrad degree. Crazy, huh?
b) Grad students are in classes with undergrads. (God knows why, but in my Celtic Civ classes, there are multiple grad students taking the same lecture as me... Weird?)
c) College here is virtually free for all Irish students. They have to pay a small fee, but other than that, their education is free. Often their housing is even covered by a government grant. In a lot of cases, this creates a huge apathy among students toward their education. Irish professors mention time and again that it would be a "really good idea to attend class"-- because so often, students just choose not to go.
d) For the most part, all kids in the same major track will take the exact same classes. For example, if you are a Celtic Civilization student, you have four or five "modules" (classes) that you are required to take (those are the only ones available to you) during your third year. So the people that you are in class with (at least the Irish full-degree students) are in every single one of your classes. I guess they aren't into educational diversity as much as we are.
Well, that's my ramble on the Irish college system; I promise more exciting things to come soon!
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