My sabbatical being over and the school year underway, I admit I've seriously slacked off on blogging. Much has been happening, some of it definitely blog-worthy, but... well... we know how that goes.
This fall I'm teaching two courses, 1900-1945 and Czech Modernism. I'm pleased to say that the vast majority of students in both classes are doing very well and seem engaged in the course material. Nearly everyone has turned in all the required work so far and many students speak up in class.
Czech Modernism is a course I can only teach every few years, as while it is in one of my areas of specialization (as are my Surrealism course and my Women in Art course), our art history program is small. Every three years I rotate among a year of 18th- and 19th-century, a year of 20th century, and a year of American art; every spring I teach the second half of the intro survey; and I teach Women in Art every two years. So, as I am the only person teaching post-Baroque, my remaining courses need to shift about among the various other courses I have developed.
When I do teach Czech Modernism, students usually enroll in the class because it fits their schedule or because they like modernism or like me--not because they have an idea what Czech Modernism might be like, although I do include Czech modernist works in some of my other courses. Kupka is important in the development of abstraction and nonobjective art, Czech cubism enters into my discussion of cubism more generally, and of course the Prague surrealist group is part of what I teach when it comes to surrealism. However, students don't necessarily remember that they've already seen Czech art in other courses.
Consequently, students are unsure what to expect and how to connect Czech modernism to whatever they may already know. They can be alarmed by the names and worry how to choose a research topic that will have enough sources in English. (There is actually a lot published in English now, but not on every artist, and not always readily available.) Soon, however, they relax a bit and discover that they're drawn to much of the art and that Czech names can be kind of fun. After all, while names like Černý (Black) are fairly ordinary, names like Mrkvička (Little Carrot) are fun to hear and know the meaning of.
This semester, we also have the luck to have one student who has been to the Czech Republic and also an auditor who not only is very interested in her Czech heritage but is also fantastically generous, bringing pages from old Mucha and Lada art calendars to distribute and even books to give away to interested students. I'm discovering that while this isn't a language class, my students enjoy being greeted in Czech and find it neat to learn various Czech words. One of my students, in fact, has found that he can use ABBYY Finereader (which I merely use for OCR) to get rough translations of Czech texts. Without ABBYY and Google Translate and various other arcane tools he has found, I cannot imagine how he'd find enough information about the 19th-century Mánes family to write the paper that I was so reluctant to let him attempt. He has been kind enough to use his skills with machine translation to help some of the other students get a sense of Czech texts they have found, too.
In my upper-level exams I don't have students do IDs. In survey, yes, but after that I want them concentrating more on concepts, on understanding the different movements, thinking about the social context, etc., not stressing out over which year a work was made (although I really do want them clear on chronology and names). In the past I have done the Czech midterm as a take-home. This time I tried giving them the questions in advance and having them write in class without notes. This worked very well. While there were some cases of people not reviewing material that they really should have--I don't want to hear that Jan Hus was alive in 1620 for the Battle of White Mountain (even though his ideas were important then), or that Kupka was a leader of the Czech cubists--overall the class wrote very good exams that showed they had prepared appropriately. When I asked at the outset whether they wanted 15 minutes per question or 20, they clamored for 20 because they had "a lot to say!" It's gratifying when a class feels it has a lot to say on the material, especially when the subject matter is something that has required real effort and study.
On the whole, my students in both classes are keeping me pleased with life as a professor. That's important at a time when my university is having some serious problems.
