Belgium Part Three

Tuesday they had nothing planned for us, so I went to Lille, France, by train to see the place. I went with another professor from Kaunas Technical University, who is apparently famous. All my students know who she is, she writes text books. We use her text books here at KLK for our social work students in the Health Faculty. We were guided around by a student who lives there and is attending Kathos as an Erasmus exchange student, same as my two social work students. It was nice; I’ll try to get some doubles of photos to include.

Wednesday was my lecture. A Perfect Day for Bananafish, from Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger, summarized and analyzed for a group of fifty psychology students. It went very well, there was laughter, and almost tears (only mine!), and the students were plenty talkative. Actually, their professor apologized later that they were so quiet, but with Lithuanian students it’s like pulling teeth. We had a lot of spare time in the end, though, because they were so much quicker at analyzing the thing with me than my students here are. That makes sense, since they’re psychology students. After I read a passage to a class, my most common questions are “Is that normal? Why would somebody do/say/feel that? What does that mean?” But my students are future teachers, not psychologists, so it takes them longer to come up with good analyses.

Thursday I took a train thirty km to another campus, the Teacher Training campus. This was my big opportunity: make a deal to exchange some pedagogy students. We don’t have any of that going on yet, and we need to catch up to the Health Faculty, from which I’ve already sent students, but which has had these bi-lateral agreements for three years (unfulfilled; I’m the first employee they’ve had to succeed in this capacity).

Within five minutes it was clear to me that we were going to make a deal. I had just found out that there’d been a proposal for exactly what I wanted last year, and that it had not been approved. This guy was friendly and eager, though, and I found out later that he had no idea why the proposal had been rejected; I thought it must have been from their side, but he said they had no reason not to work with us. We wrote an agreement to exchange two students for a semester next year and two teachers for a week each, and also he invited us to attend an conference there in November called “CRIPSIE"—CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN EUROPE. The agreement still has to go through both of our superiors, but I accomplished my main objective: mission accomplished.