the trials begin

For people like Valerie, who want to hear about the academic side of things, this post is for you. It probably won't be plastered with photographs, or be necessarily as long as some of the other posts, but it should tell you about my experiences so far.

Yesterday, as per appointment, I met with Dr. Patrick Healy, my academic advisor for the term. I found out that I was scheduled to take my Latin tutorial with Maarit Kivilo, but my other class was a problem: I had signed up to take "War and Politics in Classical Civilizations" (a tutorial of my own design). However, the man who was most qualified to teach it was going to be commuting in between Oxford and London for the duration of the term. While it was possible that he could see me on Fridays, it wasn't looking very good, so Dr. Healy asked me, in the event that Fridays didn't work out, if I'd like to take a second course with Maarit. I responded that that was fine, and asked what I could study with Dr. Kivilo. Among other things, he listed Plato's Symposium, Greek Tragedy and Homer's Iliad. Now I've done some work on the Symposium before, and enjoyed it, but wanted to try something new, so it was down to either Greek Tragedy or Homer. Having long had a desire to read Homer, but never the impetus to do so, I chose that.

After my meeting with Dr. Healy ended, I went home and promptly emailed Maarit about the Latin, feeling it wise not to bring up the second course until we knew for sure that ancient war/politics was out. She responded that we should meet the next day, and made some oblique references to the Homer course, which I interpreted (correctly, as it turned out) to mean that ancient war/politics was off the table. We arranged to meet in the cafe at Waterstone books this morning.

Dr. Kivilo is not at all what you'd expect from an Oxford Classics Professor. She's an Estonian woman of about twenty-five or thirty, with close-cropped, spiked blond hair and green glasses; a far cry from the stereotypical tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, elderly English gentleman who has become the archetype for academia in general and British academia in particular. Regardless, she is very friendly and seems so far to be extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the material.

The set-up: Oxford Study abroad students will be taking two classes. For most courses, the student writes a decent-sized paper each week, and then, at the appointed time, student and Professor meet so that the Professor can intellectually tear the paper apart while the student attempts to defend his or her statements. Language courses are rather different; the student is assigned a reading to do for the following week, and then student and Professor go through the text and try to extract as much meaning as possible from it. So, less stressful than a regular course, but still arduous.

Because Maarit knows that my particular interest is in the more politically-oriented texts, she suggested Sallust as the text for Latin. I was fine with this, and said as much, and after we discussed which editions were acceptable, we moved on to the Homer course. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that rather than just Homer's Iliad we were going to be discussing both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The shocker was that I was to have them both read "as soon as possible" (read: ideally within two weeks). My brain reacted in a way similar to the Oxonians' reaction to the recent snow: a mixture of elation and panic.